Do you really listen to your children with complete attention?

Listening and attention skills are vital in building a child’s cognitive, behavioural and affective aspects. It is essential they develop this ability to interact and communicate with the world efficiently. One of many extremely complex tasks of parenting is to be able to strike a close to ideal balance of styles of listening and responding with the appropriate styles to a child’s varying needs. Many parents may think they are truly listening when all they are doing is pretend listening or at best selective listening but this is self-deception, designed to hide from themselves their laziness. Children themselves often like to drift in and out of communication.

 

 

 

Less than ten years of age, child’s propensity to talk is so great. The effort required to truly listen can be exhausting for a parent. And finally, it would be unbelievably boring because the fact of the matter is that the chatter of ten years old is generally boring.  For true listening, no matter how brief, requires tremendous effort and total concentration. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. There are families in which the children are virtually not allowed to talk. “Children should be seen and not heard”. Such children may be seen, never interacting, silently staring at adults from the corner, MUTE ONLOOKERS FROM THE SHADOWS. Some permit their child’s chatter but simply not listen to it, so that your child is not interacting with you but is literally talking to thin air or to himself/herself.

 

 

 

Another type of parents pretend to listen, preceding along as best they can with what they are doing or with their train of thoughts while appearing to give the child their attention and occasionally making “unh huh” or “that’s nice” noises at more or less appropriate times.

 

 

 

Sometime parents do selective listening, where in they may pick up their ears if the child seems to be saying something important, hoping to separate the wheat from the chaff with a minimum effort. The problem with this way is that human mind’s capacity to filter selectively is not terribly competent or efficient, with the result that a fair amount of chaff is retained and a great deal of wheat lost.

 

 

 

Truly listening means giving your child full and complete attention, weighing each word and understanding each sentence. It is always recommended to parents that they should always truly listen to their children.

 

 

 

For children below ten years a balance of pretend, truly and selective listening is suggested. Sometimes children just want to interact with parents, just because they can’t talk to themselves, then their need can be quiet adequately met by pretend listening. At times what children want from interactions not communication but simply closeness and pretend listening will satisfy to provide them with the sense of “being with” that they want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other words, it is dull to listen to young children and truly listening at this age is real labour of love. If you give your child the same esteem you would give to your favourite task, then the child will know him or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. Value creates value. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them. The more you listen to your child, the more you’ll realize that in amongst the pauses, the stuttering, the innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say.

 

 

 

The dictum that great wisdom comes from “the mouths of babies” is recognised as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listen to children.