Parenting - listen to your children

Listening to your child boosts their self-esteem and enables them to feel worthy and loved. A parent that acts on the old adage ‘a child should be seen, not heard’ can make a child feel they are not important. Constantly ignoring your child when they are trying to speak will hurt their feelings and affect the strength of your relationship over time.

It is worth remembering that children can understand language long before they can master speech. You can keep up with your child’s evolving language development by paying daily attention to them.

Baby talk
A baby’s brain is ‘hard-wired’ to pay attention to the sound of a human voice. Their mastery of language depends on listening to you speak. Long before your baby can form understandable words, they will respond to you with noises, facial expressions and body language. You can actively listen to your baby and encourage their language development in many ways:

• Accept that crying is the baby’s primary method of communication.
• Attend to their needs as soon as you can once they start crying, to let them know they have been acknowledged and understood.
• Spend some time actively listening to your baby’s cooing and noise-making by looking them in the eye and encouraging them with smiles and talk.
• Talk to your baby frequently about any and everything. You can also read to them from books and the daily paper.

• It is more important to listen attentively to your child than to correct their grammatical errors.
• Allow your toddler sufficient time to finish what they are trying to say.
• Don’t show impatient body language, such as sighing or foot-tapping.
• Answer any questions using simple language.
• Spend some time each day doing nothing else but talking exclusively with your toddler.
• A child that constantly interrupts adult conversations may be feeling starved of sufficient attention.

• Make time every day to listen exclusively to your child without distractions.
• If your child tends to give ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, try asking open-ended questions such as ‘What was the best thing about school today?’
• Allow your child to have differences of opinion and respect their point of view.
• Try not to interrupt, lecture or criticise.

• Don’t expect them to always share your beliefs and values and try to appreciate their point of view.
• They are more likely to listen to you if you listen to them.
• Your attentive listening, empathy and understanding will encourage the young person to confide in you.
• Don’t be put off by their ‘grunts’ and disrespectful language. Keep the communication lines open at all cost. Model the communication that you want to occur and keep modelling, even when the responses are not what you would prefer.
• Let them know you are always available if they need to talk to you.
• Take an active interest in their life.

• You think your baby or child has difficulty hearing
• Your toddler isn’t speaking at all by two years of age
• Your child doesn’t understand what you say by two years of age
• Your child stutters or has some other form of speech difficulty
• You have problems communicating with your child – except adolescents (you can expect to go through some communication rough patches with your teen).

• Your doctor
• Your community health centre
• Maternal and Child Health nurse
• Family counsellor
• Parentline Tel. 13 22 89
• Family Relationship Advice Line Tel. 1800 050 321 Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm, Saturday, 10am to 4pm
• Audiologist
• Speech therapist

• Listening to your child boosts their self-esteem and helps them to feel worthy and loved.
• Make time every day to listen exclusively to your child with no distractions.
• There are services available to help families with any type of communication problem.

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