A couple of weeks ago, I was standing on the school playground with another teacher. As she was looking into space, I was telling her something of interest that had happened earlier that day, and as I neared the end of my little discourse, she interrupted me, looking at me vacuously, shaking her head slowly, and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
Well, gee, talk about unseemly. I thought I was pretty succinct. She just hadn’t been listening.
I think we agree that communication, whatever the medium, requires a sender and a receiver. We speak — someone listens. And of course the reverse is true.
We know a lot about speaking; we do a lot of it, and we think we’re probably pretty good at it.
We know less than we should, however, about listening. As listeners, we deal with distractions as we see and hear other things going on around us. Or we may interrupt our listening with our own thoughts: “I wonder whether Bill will be late for dinner again? … That woman should never wear plaid with that figure.” Or we are thinking about what we are going to say as soon as the speaker winds down. We are untrained in the art of deep listening.
So are our children. We might be surprised at how little they hear of what we are saying. OK, they are very good at selective hearing; that much we know. They may not hear you telling them that the garbage needs to be taken out, but they certainly hear you say that the ice cream truck is coming.
But children also tend to minimize — to pass off as irrelevant a lot of what we are saying, which may sound to them like this: “Tommy, blah, blah, blah, clothes, blah, blah, blah tonight, because, blah, blah and blah. Do you understand?” and Tommy nods. He now has some idea that you want him to do something about clothes, and tonight has something to do with it, but he’s not sure what. Maybe you want him to bring his dirty clothes downstairs because you’re going to do the wash to night. Actually, you want him to wear his nice clothes tonight because company is coming for dinner.
Ah, but those same children who have much to learn from us, have much to teach us, if we would listen carefully and perceptively to them. I have covered this in an earlier column in a somewhat different context, but it bears repeating: Let them speak. Let them speak first. Let them get their thoughts, feelings and creative ideas expressed so they have room to process yours.
You may find the process of teaching listening skills to young children difficult and exasperating, and given all else that we want them to learn, it could well be such a challenge that it may not seem worth the effort. It may be sufficient for you to speak slowly and distinctly, and repeat what you just said. But as they grow, these children will find many opportunities to learn to listen deeply.
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the peer counseling programs being carried on in many middle schools and high schools today. Here, select groups of boys and girls are trained to visit with fellow students who may be dealing with a variety of frustrations that they would be more willing to share with a concerned fellow student than an adult. The anomaly here is that, despite the fact that they are called peer counselors, they do not counsel.
They listen.
The theory behind this program is that kids have the ability to solve many of their own problems if they can just bounce them off someone — a fellow student to whom they can relate, whom they look up to and who will listen to them.
So these “counselors” are trained to listen, never to offer advice. Eye contact is essential.
Many guidelines support peer counseling programs. One is to ask open-ended questions which will encourage students to respond with answers which lead to additional questions. Not, “Do you like to skateboard?” which can only be answered “yes,” “no, or “sort of,” but “What do you like to do? “Why do you like to do that?” These are questions which may yield some common ground which will help the student to bond to his or her counselor. Eventually, the ice may be broken to the point where some serious concerns are addressed. This may take one session, or several.
The counselor’s response comes in the form of reflective listening, or reframing, and this is at the core of the program. If a student finally says, “I’m just a piece of dog doo and I’m goin’ nowhere,” the counselor may respond with that student’s own statement, reframed into a more positive one: “You wish you could feel better about yourself, and have a goal in life.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly how I feel.”
“Well, what do you think you might do in order for that to happen?”
There’s a lot more to it, but you get the idea. As parents, we can use some of these same skills designed to encourage our kids to talk to us and arrive at their own solutions. Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
