Relating Empathetically – Part 12: Readings – 4
It may seem strange to begin our overview of verbal communication contrasts with listening instead of talking. But remember, this is aimed at parents. And as painful as it may be to admit, some of us fail to really listen to our children. Sometimes this includes me, I regret to say.
When Dave was in high school, he once asked me to stop mixing cookie dough and listen to him. I said that I had been listening, to which he replied, “I don’t feel like you hear me when you won’t stop and look at me.”
Zap! I felt as if I’d taken a bullet in the heart. I suddenly realized that I’d been doing that to Dave and Becky for years. Sure, I had read about how parents could improve communication with children: I knew the importance of eye contact to make the other person feel “heard.” What I did not know was how much my childhood learning short-circuited good communication principles.
I grew up believing that doing only one thing at a time was inexcusably inefficient. I specialized in multiplying my daily allotment of moments by cramming most of them with at least two activities. I was feeling smugly satisfied with myself, actually, on the afternoon of Dave’s request: I was baking cookies and listening to him at the same time. But that afternoon, Dave needed a “laying on of ears and eyes” more than a plateful of warm cookies.
Reflecting on that experience, I see that throughout much of my parenting, I focused more on doing for than onbeing with my children. Many times this shame-based preoccupation with productivity interfered with respectfully listening to Dave and Becky with my undivided attention.
Perhaps our greatest obstacle to listening is our own desire to talk. Often we’re like the man invited to give a brief talk at his Yale alumni meeting. Using the four letters in Yale as an outline, he waxed eloquent and long on each:Youth, Achievement, Loyalty and finally Enthusiasm. When he finished his “brief” talk nearly two hours later, a bored guest whispered to a companion, “I’m sure glad he didn’t graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology!”
As parents, our “talks” frequently become lengthy lectures or sermons. This is easy to understand when we consider that many of us grew up with parents who were “talk terrorists.” While lobbing verbal hand grenades and detonating deadly word-bombs (often very sweetly), they taught us that parents possess the inalienable right to talk without listening. They made it as clear to us as their parents had to them: “Children are to be seen and not heard.”
Now that we are the parents, we want to stamp our feet and shout, “My turn, my turn!” However, our children have this annoying habit of wanting us to listen—really listen—to them. (Remember back when you still indulged that desire, before you surrendered it to inescapable barrages of parental verbiage—or perhaps to stone-silent stares?) This is a significant choice point for those of us longing to become shame free parents. Will we “take our turn” and continue the family pattern? Or will we begin listening to understand with eyes and ears?
Here’s something to consider when weighing this choice. First, some of us have begun to suspect that we don’t understand our children much better than our folks understood us. Second, we learn more about our children by listening to them than by talking at them. If this is true, then we may “discover” our children more fully than ever before when we “pay the price” to become better listeners. The cost of this priceless discovery? We must willingly relinquish our turn at terrorist talking.
Another reason we need to listen to our children is to help them learn problem-solving skills. This may be one hundred eighty degrees from our own childhood experiences. In most dysfunctional families, when a child takes a problem to parents they tend to ignore it or “solve” it themselves by imposing their own ideas.
What a contrast to healthier families where parents respond by asking something like, “What ideas have you thought of?” Parents then help their children generate and evaluate various solution options and potential outcomes. This process takes some time and it requires that both the parents and the children listen, think and talk.
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Shame-Free Parenting, Sandra Wilson, InterVarsity Press, pages 123-125.
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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?
Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?
David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.
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For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.
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