The Lost Art of Listening (42 page)

played out by the other. The tough man may be unable to integrate his

softer side to the extent that his wife acts emotional and helpless. His

dependent wishes and vulnerability are repudiated because they’re seen as

her domain. She then becomes a dependent and demanding wife. This is

one reason men take revenge for their dependency—that bottomless need

for mother-love—by bullying and belittling their wives for exhibiting the

needs they themselves don’t dare express.

In our day, gender differences have permeated public consciousness.

No longer do we believe that men are strong and women weak. Yet what

is the current vogue of celebrating women’s uniqueness if not stereotyping

updated? It’s hard for husbands and wives to work at partnership when all

around they are told that women speak in a different voice and men have

strange ways of communicating.

Are we once again to believe that anatomy is destiny? So many hus-

bands and wives run out of patience with each other that they sometimes

lose hope of ever reaching understanding. This haunting feeling of frus-

tration is something that comes to all of us from time to time. If it helps

some people to blame failures of understanding on irreconcilable gender

differences, and if doing so seems to armor them against their own despair,

fine. But if stereotyping serves to abstract members of the opposite sex, to

turn them into categories, and to avoid genuine encounters, that is unfor-

tunate. Exaggerating gender differences is a crutch favored by those who

fail to find understanding—no, fail to
reach
understanding.

The wounded narcissism and boundless ambition of our time militate

against self- sacrifice, compromise, and partnership. In hard and troubled

How to Listen and Be Heard within the Family
251

times like ours, loyalty, tolerance, cooperation, and complementarity—the

values necessary to create and sustain family harmony—are undervalued.

Too often we hear what once might have been thought of as teamwork

described as codependency.

We tend not to see complementarity. Instead, we see control and

submission, power and weakness, villain and victim. In trying to create

more flexibility for both men and women, we are in danger of forgetting

that complementarity can be mutually enhancing. Self- fulfillment doesn’t

require constant self- assertion. The sturdy self can tolerate differences and

thrive on them.

Exercises

1.
Make a list of three annoying things someone in your family does on a

regular basis. Next, for each one of these things, write down how you

think that person would prefer to be seen. See if you can direct yourself

to the person’s preferred view in your next encounter. In other words,

try to treat them as the people they prefer to think of themselves as.

2.
Identify one boundary in your family that you don’t like—for example,

your wife is too involved with the children, or your husband is too dis-

tant. Remembering that boundaries are reciprocal (enmeshment in one

place is related to disengagement in another), try to identify the part

you play in perpetuating the boundary you don’t like. Don’t be in a rush

to change anything; just observe.

3.
Try to identify two or three triangles you participate in. If there is a

triangle where you are on the uncomfortable outside, try moving not

to the person you want to be closer to but to the person or activity on

the other pole. For example, if you’re a father who resents all the time

your wife spends with the kids, try moving closer to the kids and see

what happens.

4.
Are you more enmeshed with or disengaged from your children? With

your partner? For an experiment, try moving closer or further away and

notice what signs of resistance or unbending routines block your move-

ment.

LISTENING IN CONTEXT

Listening to Children and Teenagers

12

…

From

“Do I
Have
To?”

to “That’s Not Fair!”

Listening to Children and Teenagers

When new parents leave the hospital to bring home their first baby, that

smiling miracle of their own creation, they wonder,
What now? How will

we know what to do?
They soon find out. A baby’s needs are simple, and the

crying that announces them is simply overwhelming.

Once the baby is fed and changed and has had enough sleep, parents

convey their responsiveness through cuddling and play. “Listening” at this

age consists of reading the baby’s mood—rather than imposing the par-

ents’ moods, as though the baby were an extension of themselves.

Long before a baby can talk, his parents demonstrate how well they

are able to listen. Here as elsewhere, flexibility and responsiveness make

for willingness to tolerate the otherness of another being. Call it sensitiv-

ity.

The Parent’s Gift of Empathy

A parent’s empathy— understanding what a child is feeling and showing

it—builds a bridge of understanding, linking the child to someone who

252

Listening to Children and Teenagers
253

listens and cares, thus confirming that the child’s feelings are legitimate.

The sharing of emotional experience is the most powerful feature of true

relatedness.

How do you empathize with a child who won’t stop pestering, as

though he were the center of the universe and you had no concerns of

your own? The solution is not to mistake sympathy for empathy. Sympa-

thy means to feel the same as rather than to be understanding of. It’s an

emotion that makes people suffer
with
others, and that feeling motivates

parents to talk children out of their feelings or to do
for
them rather than

to empathize
with
them.

Foremost among the obstacles to listening are those that stem from

our need to
do something
about what someone tells us: defend ourselves,

disagree, or solve the other person’s problems. Parents are prone to offer

advice; it comes with the job description. But if a father’s first response to

his son’s painful sunburn is that he should have used sunblock, the boy

will feel blamed rather than commiserated with. Likewise, if a little girl

complains that she doesn’t have any friends and her mother tells her that

if she acted friendlier, other children would be more friendly in return, the

girl might conclude that even her mother doesn’t like her.

Psychologists use the term
empathic immersion
to describe the intense

and focused listening that therapists use to understand their patients’

experience. It is an evocative metaphor, but it is of course hyperbole. Per-

haps a better metaphor for empathy would be taking someone’s hand.1 Two

clasped hands are still two hands—but they are also two hands touching,

the warmth and pulse of one in contact with the other.

To be better listeners parents should lead less and follow more. If a

child shows signs of distress, a simple statement like “You feel bad, don’t

you?” is more likely to make him feel understood than pressuring him to

explain what he feels. If an exasperated child indicates that she wants to

be alone, let her. She may need time to pull herself together. If someone

is having a hard time putting something into words, it’s more empathic to

say “It’s hard to explain, isn’t it?” than to guess what the person is trying

to say. A parent who finishes a child’s thoughts for him is the opposite of

empathic.

1I am indebted to Alfie Kohn for this metaphor. Alfie Kohn,
The Brighter Side of Human

Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1990).

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LISTENING IN CONTEXT

Listening well is more midwifery than dentistry.

In the presence of an empathic listener, children are able

to discover their own minds rather than having to resist

or succumb to what someone else expects them to feel.

The empathic failure that saps self- regard isn’t the kind of child

abuse we usually hear about; it is a silent, invidious lack of responsiveness.

Empathic failure doesn’t batter, bruise, or injure children; it deflates them.

Empathy is energizing. Being listened to releases us from brooding self-

absorption and mobilizes us to engage the world around us. With insuf-

ficient empathy children grow up preoccupied with themselves, as though

attention were a need that, unmet, keeps growing. The unlistened-to child

remains locked in silent conversation within himself, too anxious and

unavailable to enter the freedom of the moment.

Listening to Young Children

Being listened to creates a sense of being cared for. Not being listened to

generates insecurity. In practice, not being listened to may take forms that

aren’t always obvious. Here are some cues that you’re not listening to a

young child— despite the fact that you care very much.

“Watch Out!”

Some parents who seem attentive are more concerned with the exter-

nal environment than their children. They hover over their babies and

make sympathetic noises, but they don’t listen. They pay attention to

the hard edges of a table, sharp things on the floor, cold drafts, and hot

food. Because they worry a lot, they seem involved with their children.

But because they’re preoccupied with trying to make the world safe, they

remain too anxious to share the baby’s experience. These “child- centered”

parents provide almost no experience of intersubjectivity. The impression

of closeness they convey is an illusion. Hovered-over but not- listened-to

children may become dependent, in the sense of being uneasy on their

own—not because they’re used to intimacy but because they suffer from

Listening to Children and Teenagers
255

a pervasive sense of aloneness, an intolerable feeling from which they use

superficial relationships to distract themselves.

“Quiet Down, Go Wash Your Hands, and for Goodness’ Sake,

Don’t Touch Yourself There!”

More common than this general lack of attunement is the selective attune-

ment by which parents convey to their children what is shareable and

what is shameful. In this way the parents’ desires, fears, prohibitions, and

fantasies affect the wiring of a child’s self- system, leaving the child with

the conviction that he is or is not a self worthy of respect.

Selective attunement determines what falls inside or outside the

realm of acceptability. Is it all right to bang toys on the floor, to get dirty,

to touch yourself? It includes preferences for people: is it all right to get

mad at Grandma or sometimes to prefer to play with her rather than with

Mommy? And it includes the extent to which internal states—joy, sad-

ness, delight—can be experienced with another person. Is the child whose

parents try to jolly him out of it when he’s frightened likely to come to

them with his fears when he’s older?

It’s the breadth of attunement—from generous to cramped—that

determines whether children feel okay about themselves and whether they

have a broad or narrow range of experience.

Suppose a toddler listening to
Peter and the Wolf
is happy and excited.

He’s moved by the music and wonders if his mother feels it too. He looks

up, and she smiles back at him; her eyes are bright and she’s nodding.

Yes, she feels it too!
With this attunement, the child knows that he is feel-

ing something that can be shared—rather than something that should be

stifled. His feeling is validated; and since the feeling is part of him, he too

is validated.

“Don’t Brag. It’s Not Nice.”

In addition to the lessons parents teach deliberately, they shape their chil-

dren’s experience with negative affective responses. When a child proudly

shows off to a parent who responds with disgust or disinterest, it’s a slap in

the face of the child’s healthy narcissism. This is shame.

What children show off for their parents’ approval isn’t simply what

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LISTENING IN CONTEXT

they can do; it’s also their fantasies of who they wish they were and what

they dream of doing. They’re not little and weak—oh no, they’re big and

strong! If parents squelch that wonderful wish to make an impression, the

child may decide that he’s unworthy or that he has to achieve really big

things for anybody to notice.

Before you let negative reactions slip out, think about why you’re

tempted to be so critical or disapproving. Is it really a prohibition your

child needs, or are you more concerned about what other people might

think? Sometimes, in an attempt to instill social graces too early, we crush

a child’s self- esteem.
Listen
to what your child is saying. The little girl who

shouts, “I can jump higher than Robbie!” isn’t putting down her friend;

she’s seeking your approval. Why not give it to her?