5 Reasons Why You Should Stop Selectively Listening to Children [Excerpt]

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Excerpt: If you don’t genuinely listen to children, you might miss this. Here are 5 reason why you should stop selectively listening to children.

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For true listening, no matter how brief, requires tremendous effort.

First of all, it requires total concentration.  You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.  If a parent wants to truly listen to a child, the parent must put aside everything else.  The time of true listening must be devoted solely to the child; it must be the child’s time.  If you are not willing to put aside everything, including your own worries and preoccupations for such a time, then you are not willing to truly listen.

Second, the effort required for total concentration on the words of a six-year-old child is considerably greater than that required for listening to a great lecturer.  The child’s speech patterns are uneven – occasional rushes of words interspersed with pauses and repetitions – which makes concentration difficult.  Then the child will usually be talking of matters that have no inherent interest for the adult, whereas the great lecturer’s audience is specifically interested in the topic of his speech.

In other words, it is dull to listen to a six-year-old, which makes it doubly difficult to keep concentration focused.  Consequently truly listening to a child of this age is a real labor of love.  Without love to motivate the parent it couldn’t be done.

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…But Why Bother?

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Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?  

First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child.  If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable.  There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.

Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value.  They will rise to your expectation of them.

Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the studderings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say.  The dictum that great wisdom comes from “the mouths of babes” is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children.  Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual.  And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen.  And the more you will learn.

Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach.  Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.

Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem  And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you.  And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become.

If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love.  Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth.  Value creates value.  Love begets love.  Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love.

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The above piece is an excerpt from The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. If you enjoyed it, then you might enjoy reading his book in full.

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