Brooke Shields shared the simple parenting trick she uses to get her kids to open up more, without being a helicopter parent

• Brooke Shields, mother of two, shared a quick parenting tip at the 2024 PHM HealthFront.

• Talking to your kids while you drive a car can take the pressure off of them opening up.

• Because you're looking forward and not intensely focusing on them, they might open up more.

When it comes to parenting, one of the biggest challenges is getting your kids to speak openly about complicated feelings without being too overbearing.

Brooke Shields knows this struggle well, as a mom of two daughters, the youngest of whom is about to leave the house.

"All you want them to do is just stick by you, and then finally, they show you that they're flying and free and you're like, 'Wait a minute, come back!'" Shields, 58, said at the 2024 PHM HealthFront, a two-day event in NYC for health media and healthcare marketers. "So you have to keep the dialogue going. You really just have to keep talking."

One of Shields' priorities is finding healthy ways to get her daughters to open up. She shared one simple, quick tip for getting your children to naturally talk more — without delving into helicopter parent territory.

Talk while you're driving

Shields believes talking to your kids while you're driving the car and they're in the backseat is the "best thing."

"It's like being in the wild," she said. "You don't make eye contact with them, you drive forward and you just go, 'So why do you think that happened?'"

The idea is that by not intensely focusing on them as they speak, you get them to share more because there's less pressure on every word they say.

"They say stuff in cars," Shields said. (A few people in the audience laughed and murmured "so true.")

Getting them to feel safe in being honest with you pays off when they're older, Shields said, speaking from experience.

"You have to have conversations with them about what's happening with their bodies, about what they're feeling about," she said.

Shields wants to be more 'intentional' than her mother was

During her PHM interview, Shields opened up about how her mother, Teri Shields, indirectly influenced her parenting style.

"The hardest thing for me with my mother was just loving an alcoholic," Shields said. "That was my number one problem."

Shields previously described her relationship with her mother as "codependent" and so intense that it caused her to be "cut off" from her sexuality.

In raising her daughters, Shields said wanted to break the dysfunctional dynamic she had with her mother and not have them perform the same "desperate caretaking" role she did as a child.

"It was a lot, and everything was on my shoulders," Shields said. "That's because she wasn't strong enough, wasn't intentional. I want to prove to them that my issues are not their problem."

Read the original article on Business Insider