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.
