The Situation For Parents What we parents want for our children is simply "the best." We want them to know how deeply we love them. We want their lives to be good, we want them not to suffer any hurt or insult. We want them to be happy. Our love for them is "the right stuff" for parenting.

However, we are caught in a painful dilemma: for most of us, parenting is a far bigger job than we had ever imagined, and we find ourselves stretched to the limit of our stamina. The high intellectual and emotional challenge of raising a child is not addressed in any serious way in our society. So when our children fight over who gets the red fire truck, we face the important issues of power, aggression, jealousy, violence, property rights, discipline, human development, and sibling relationships. We also face our own tensions and confusions. And, for the most part, we grapple with these and other complex problems alone.

 

To put the situation simply, we have plenty of commitment and caring. But we don't know what tools to use to help us turn this powerful love into a steady, appropriately nurturing environment for our children. Our ability to acquire such tools is severely limited by our economic position: childrearing is, economically speaking, a "hobby." We parents have little time, little energy, and little access to learning environments that support our parenting efforts.

 

Loving our children effectively is vital, important work, and we parents need three basic kinds of resource to support this work, which is so close to our hearts.

 

• Help. Help with dishes, diapers, mess patrol, child care, transportation, meals. The amount of work parents do is enormous. There's never enough plain old help for parents.
  
• Learning assistance. Exposure to other parents' ideas, support to think through problems, time to sort through experience and plan experiments, and mentors to learn from can help to change parenting from an endurance feat to an interesting and rewarding challenge.
  
• Stress release. We are calm, reasonable beings who also have passionate feelings about our children. Feelings of worry, fear, frustration, disappointment, anger, jealousy, and exhaustion often dilute our joy in our children. We need dependable ways to get free of these tensions we carry. Our children are happy, easy-going, loving people who have passionate feelings about many of their experiences, too. Like us, they need dependable ways to get free of the tensions that build on them each day.

Listening Parent-to-Parent

Listening is a tool which can powerfully address the needs of parents for learning assistance and stress release. It's not a "quick fix" tool. Where human behavior is concerned, there are few overnight solutions. However, parents have the natural ability to assist each other by listening, and when this ability is developed over time, we become more resourceful, more able to care effectively, and more able to enjoy our relationships with our children. We become surer of ourselves as mothers and fathers.

 

Here's how it can work. Two parents who share the goal of learning from their parenting and getting rid of stress make an agreement. They become "listening partners." The agreement is to exchange regular listening time: a half-hour a week, or 20 minutes daily before going home from work, or on the phone after the children are in bed. The details of the arrangements are up to them.

 

During this listening time, equal turns are taken. One person talks, and the other listens and cares. The listener offers no advice, no helpful hints, and asks no questions to satisfy his own curiosity. He communicates full respect and appreciation. The listener makes the basic assumption that talking things through will help the other person to sort and learn from his own experience. When time is up, the two change roles, and the person who listened then has time to examine his experience, feelings, and thoughts, with the full attention of his listening partner.

 

This kind of time to think, uninterrupted, about oneself and one's own life is an almost unknown commodity in the lives of parents. It helps us untangle the web of experience, feelings, and expectations that can snarl our relationships with our children and other significant people in our lives. When we can examine our own experience in detail, we become freer to think of new approaches, to problem-solve, and to act intentionally when difficult situations arise. We are assisted to think and learn.

 

The Benefits of Listening Partnerships

Over time, parents who develop a listening partnership will come to trust each other enough to release and heal some of the tensions of parenting. We care deeply about our children, and that caring means that we have griefs, fears, and frustrations aplenty that complicate our busy lives. A trusted listening partner, who has kept sight of the goodness and intelligence of the parent, can be called upon to listen when important issues arise. A parent who feels safe enough to laugh or cry or express frustration during this protected listening time will return to a challenging situation more relaxed, more able to think rather than react.

 

Listening partnerships between parents allow us to pool resources. Partnerships let two people pay attention to one person's experience, speeding the process of learning from and shedding tension from that experience. They also work against the isolation of parenting: the chance to help each other in significant ways is deeply rewarding. It is very encouraging to be allowed to assist the efforts of another mother or father to love well.

 

Listening partnerships between parents also strengthen our abilities to listen well to our children. As we are listened to, we gain an understanding of what it's like to be respected and supported while we clarify our thoughts or show our feelings. This way of taking care of ourselves and recovering our ability to think clearly gives us a better picture of what our children need from us when times are tough for them.

 

Listening to Children

When children are feeling good about themselves and close to the people they're with, they are loving, thoughtful, flexible, easygoing, creative, and energetic. They learn during every moment. When they aren't feeling good about themselves, or feel distant from the people they're with, they don't usually resign themselves to this state of affairs. They try to find some release for their bad feelings, or some bridge across the distance they feel. To send up news of their state of distress, they engage in plainly tense, withdrawn, unkind, stereotyped or otherwise irrational behavior. They ask for attention, because they know they need help getting back to the loving, flexible state of mind they so enjoy. They hope we'll read their signals and come to their rescue. Our listening is what they need.

 

Children are the world's experts on tension release. When they are sad, they cry. When they are afraid, they hold on tight and tremble or perspire, and make lots of noise. When they are embarrassed or are challenging their lighter fears, they laugh. When they are frustrated, they have a tantrum. These are the natural ways they clear the emotional debris that jams their ability to love and learn effectively. By listening to children thoroughly at times of emotional difficulty, we give them the approval and the time they need to shed the feelings that burden them.

 

The "Broken Cookie"

Children often choose pretexts for emotional release. They pick a petty, insignificant issue, and use it like a can opener. The trivial incident happens, and a voluminous rush of deep feeling pours out. I call this the "broken cookie" phenomenon. Your child's cookie breaks, and she begins to cry. If you listen and stay close, without replacing the cookie (which is certainly still edible), she will cry even harder, and perhaps rage as well. She will unload a cargo of disappointment she's been carrying, little of which is related to the broken cookie. But your listening and closeness, your willingness to hear it all, will bring forth deep feelings that she has carried alone. If you allow her to decide when she's finished, she'll cry long and hard. When she stops crying, she'll be a changed person. She'll feel loved and respected by you (even if she's been berating you during her crying). She'll feel relaxed, affectionate, and sure of herself. She'll be eager for life again, and thoroughly refreshed.

 

The "Spoiled Outing"

Children will also ask for help with their worst feelings when you have been most loving, generous, and playful with them. This is the "spoiled outing" phenomenon. After a warm, close family time, such as a special trip, a child will suddenly become upset and unreasonable. He has collected lots of reassurance from you that he is loved. So he will instinctively try to get your help with whatever irrational feelings that this good time with you has contradicted. He wants to be rid of feelings that don't make sense. And your loving attention while he laughs, cries, or rages will let him shed those irrationalities. He is "disintegrating," in a sense, and he'll absorb your attention and support if you listen. When he has cried or raged through the painfully irrational way he had thought about himself and his experience, he'll be able to "integrate" your love and support into his picture of the world, where he felt distant and upset before.

 

The Difficulties and Payoff

Listening to children, especially through their griefs and fears, is very difficult for us. Few of us had anyone we could fall apart with when times were hard. Few of us had our parents' approval when we were trying to shed the tensions that plagued us. So as you offer fuller listening to your child, you'll have no model in your own experience for the respect and trust you are trying to give. In this uncharted territory the listening partnership you have with another parent can be of key assistance. Your experience in being listened to and trusted will give you the backup you need to dare to listen in new and uncomfortable ways.

The payoff to listening thoroughly to your children is a big one. They will be able to work through and get rid of major difficulties in their lives with this kind of assistance from you. They'll become more themselves. Their confidence will build. They will more often feel your caring. Listening has great power to convey how much you care for and trust your child. It's a simple tool which can help you become a more powerful parent.