Youth have felt more frustrated to communicate with their parents due to increasing family conflicts (e.g. social issues and COVID-19). Family conflicts are harmful to youth’s mental health outcomes, such as depression, anxiety disorder, eating disorder, and low self-esteem. Nonviolent Communication (NVC) can facilitate and improve parent-youth positive relationships through observations, feelings, needs, and requests. This project aims to employ NVC to cultivate parent-youth positive relationships and to reduce the number of parent-youth conflicts.
A four-week psychoeducational intervention was conducted for eight Hong Kong colleges to learn and apply NVC to reduce conflicts and improve the relationship with their parents. The content of the workshops included learning the four components of NVC, playing NVC card games, practicing NVC with role-plays, and take-home practice. Furthermore, each participant needed to complete the NVC workbook weekly, to record their observation of their communication style with their parents and applications of NVC. This designed program was tailored-made and culturally sensitive for Chinese families, such as conflict topics, choice of words and slangs, and daily examples. The same program design can apply to participants from different countries.
Research outcomes were measured with the Adjective Checklist on parents-youth relationship, Conflict Tactics Scale, and thematic analysis of participants’ in-depth reflection and insights on NVC applications. Participants reported fewer conflicts with more positive descriptions of their parents. After the 4-week intervention with practice, participants increased their sense of self and other- awareness with empathy skills which led to more positive communication with their parents. Furthermore, the level of parent-youth closeness was increased. This study can benefit youth’s understanding of mutual respect, acceptance, and intimacy through NVC training to enhance positive relationships with their parents. Another significance of this study is to improve parent-youth relationships to support youth wellbeing and reduce their behavioral and psychological problems.