The most common problem that parents face with their children is stubbornness , kids never listen to them!
When I look to adults conversation with each other I found them that they don’t listen, they just interrupt the conversation either to advice , tell their opinion, criticize , or tell their own personal experience
We all have tendency just to talk and don’t listen to each others , and we ask our children to listen to us
This drive me to interview Patty Wipfler the co-author of international book “Listen” and the founder of Hand in Hand organization in the United States
From your experience Patty, why can’t adults listen to each other, why can’t they just listen without judging or advice, just wait till the other person ends his talk?
Mostly how we were raised, how we were treated as children, determines our ability as adults to listen to one another
when you have a room full of people who have not yet been treated with warmth and respect when they were young, who have not yet been listened to, they wont have the ability to listen to others also learning and cooperation with others become very difficult.
So to make decisions, people have to use, not the power of agreement, cooperation, , but the power of authority (it is my way or your way).
That because we all mostly treated with authoritarian way , our parents screamed, yelled so that we obey to them.
They treated us as ignorant who should listen to the adults
The main problem Patty that parents are facing nowadays is kids don’t listen to them.
When I tell parents that children listen to us when we listen to them., they found it very silly , children don’t have anything of importance to tell us
What prevents parent to listen to their children, from your experience with many cultures how adults perceive children generally?
Most cultures believe that children don’t think. That they are, in a way, “uncivilized,” and don’t know how to love, to cooperate, to obey adults, or to act properly.
We are taught that children must be “trained,” almost like an animal, to do what mature adults want them to do. We believe that children don’t think, they just react.
There are many associated beliefs that all are rooted in the idea that adults have better judgment than children at all times, and that adults must show children the right way to think, to act, and to learn
So we don’t listen to our children because we’ve been told they don’t have anything to tell us.
We see their facial expressions as “cute” and “amusing,” rather than as giving us a window into their thoughts and feelings at every moment.
We tend to ask our babies to entertain us. We tend to show them off as “cute” to others , rather than creating two-way, spontaneous, caring communication with them.
Interesting Patty, what s the truth about children?
This lack of respect for children’s intelligence is not backed up by fact. Children are born with full intelligence.
They lack experience in the world, so there are many things they don’t know, but their intelligence is at work, at genius level, processing experience and making sense of what happens to them and around them, second by second, day by day, from before they are born.
Their social-emotional mind is fully operative. Their understanding of our emotional states, their ability to detect and respond to loving and respectful treatment, their negative reactions to adult emotional tension, their need for warm, loving, respectful human connection, all are operative from birth.
What parents need to do to listen to their children and how this will impact their children behavior?
Pratice, training can be a magical solution for them, we also don’t have to do these in every situation our child want us to listen to him but we can do that for few minutes a day
Hand in Hand offer 10 minutes tools that you can do 10 minutes a day which will extend you capability to listen to your child, let your child feel connected to you and thus enhance his thinking capabilities and his ability to listen to his parent or any caregiver
What is the impact on children when they have other parents / caregiver applied these 10 minutes parenting tools, on their behavior, on their development?
We have watched children who were raised with parents who listened to their feelings, who applied these tools for over 40 years now.
What we have seen is that it’s a LOT of work, but that work pays off handsomely!
The children tend to be kinder to others. They tend to be leaders among their peers.
They tend to be creative. They tend to know themselves well, and to have passionate likes and the persistence it takes to learn new skills well. They tend to show caring toward other children.
They tend to bounce back from adversity. And many of them grow up to do work they choose, work they love, work that makes the world a better place.
Thank you Patty for this lovely interview and for spreading this concept and tools all over the world
