parenting skills

To Love is to Listen

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 7 Comments

I have a confession to make – I’m a terrible listener. I like learning about other people, but I enjoy talking about myself even more. When something comes to mind, I say it far too often, even if someone else is in the middle of talking about something else entirely. (This post describes me perfectly.) My filter has improved over the years, but it’s something I’ve literally worked on for decades and I’m only 31 years old. So among my many fears of becoming a parent, not being a good enough listener was way up there.

Recently, I was reminded of how far I have to go upon reading some co-workers’ evaluations of me. They did say a lot of good things, but it was very clear that I could do more to listen and consider other people’s perspectives. To me, the starkest sign was that I said that I try to genuinely listen to others, while my co-workers said I sometimes just pretend to listen. Unfortunately, both of them are true – even though I try to listen, I still fail at it too often.

While this has some implications for my career, it was even more of a wake-up call for my parenting. You can suck at listening and still be a good employee, but you can’t be a good parent. As Sprout communicates more and starts speaking, my listening skills are only going to increase in importance.

For one, listening well is one of the best ways I can respect my son. Our society undermines children’s perspectives and feelings, telling them that they should be this way because authority says so or this way because it’s trendy. Not listening to children or perhaps worse, pretending to listen and then steamrolling them shows kids that they aren’t valued. And when parents don’t respect kids, they don’t receive respect back. Plus, if kids aren’t respected at home, they try to find from other places, many of which aren’t healthy. In fact, three of my favorite parenting resources really focus on how good listening connects to respect. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk has some phenomenal examples of ghonest active listening, Dr. Karp’s Happiest Toddler on the Block gives tips on how to listen when your kid is barely speaking, and this video talks about how listening is related to teaching the meaning of consent.

In addition to respecting my son, I want to be a role model for him. If he takes after his dad, he’ll already have a head start, but I still want to set a good example. As the consent video points out, if we wait until kids are teenagers to teach about consent, it’s too late. Consent is fundamentally about respecting other people’s preferences and boundaries, which we learn through good listening. Learning how to listen well is probably one of the best life skills I can pass on to Sprout.

Fortunately, becoming a mother has already set me down a path for improvement. The How to Listen book made me aware of a lot of tendencies I hadn’t even realized, like giving advice when people just want someone to listen. It also helped me realize that saying very little while actively showing that you’re paying attention can truly draw people out.

At the time, Sprout wasn’t communicating much beyond crying, so I practiced on our neighbors’ kids instead. Coming home from work, I ran into a couple of them coming back from the park. One of them started telling me extensively about his coin collection, declaring that he was going to invest in silver because “it was low and expected to climb.” At the same time, the other kid randomly proclaimed that “you can’t trust anyone.” When I asked, “Hmmm. Why do you say that?” he explained that someone he thought was cool called someone else gay and you shouldn’t do that. I tipped my hand a little by commenting, “But it’s okay for people to love whomever they want” and agreeing that it shouldn’t be used as a slur. In the less than 5 minutes I walked with them I learned so much about their lives by just listening and respecting what they had to say.

As Sprout still doesn’t have many vocabulary words, listening to him now involves carefully figuring out his needs by watching him. I can then vocalize what he wants to communicate but doesn’t have the language skills to do so. (This especially important considering our half-assed at best efforts at teaching him sign language.) Figuring out what he’s “saying” forces me to take his needs seriously, rather than brush them off as whining. It’s worked pretty well, calming him and helping him demonstrate more patience than I think he would otherwise.

My relationship with him has also helped lay the foundation for better listening skills by fundamentally changing how my brain works. One of the main reasons I’m such a bad listener is because I find it very hard to shut off my internal monologue. You shouldn’t think about what you’re going to say while someone else is talking, but my brain will be four paragraphs ahead if I let it. It takes a serious conscious effort for me to focus. Fortunately, this clarity of thought is something I find easier to achieve with Sprout than anyone else. Since I’ve returned to work, I’ve tried hard to make our time together on weekdays special without outside thoughts crowding it. As he had even less to say at the time, I learned to appreciate just watching him and enjoying his company. Now, I can sit on the lawn and watch him play in the grass far longer than I would have imagined before becoming a parent.

Parenting exposes your biggest strengths and weaknesses. As I face mine head-on with honesty, I find that the growth to become a better parent is making me a better wife, daughter, friend, co-worker and neighbor as well.

Are there any skills you’ve felt compelled to improve on as a parent?

And you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

Title from Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

Sometimes, I feel like a fraud. While I walk around pretending to be an adult, I am unqualified to hold the title. I have a good job, own a house, am married, and am a mother, but it’s all a facade. Lately, I’ve forgotten to do important errands at work, lost the thread of conversations, and even left my wallet at home during a week-long vacation. I feel scatterbrained, navigating my way through my messy house and life.

This feeling particularly scratches at the back of my mind when I think about my parenting skills. How on earth could they trust me with such a precious life? (I’m not sure who “they” are – perhaps a mysterious cabal of tsk-tsking old ladies that write parenting manuals.)

That voice is especially loud when I’ve made some dopey but innocent mistake. One such example happened at my sister-in-laws’ wedding last weekend, held at her fiancee’s family’s house. The plan was to have Sprout at the ceremony, then put him to sleep in an upstairs bedroom. With the baby monitor in-hand, we would be able to rejoin the party and celebrate. While I was fairly confident in this plan, I checked on Sprout about an hour after I put him to bed. Opening the door, I was startled to find the hostess of the party cradling my baby! She explained that her oldest son had heard him screaming and failed to calm him down. She then took Sprout from her son and rocked him back to sleep. Horrified that I didn’t hear him, I swallowed back tears, thanked her, and then almost grabbed him from her arms. Even though I knew that no long-term harm had been done, the drum-beat of failure pounded in my ears.

When an incident like that happens and Chris tells me, “You’re a great mother,” part of me can’t accept it. It feels like he and the rest of my family are trying to allay my insecurity, just saying it to make me feel better, regardless of the reality.

So it was reassuring to overhear my mom bragging about my parenting skills to my in-laws over Christmas dinner. I took Sprout to the living room to put him to sleep while everyone else stayed in the dining room. I don’t know how the subject came up, but I caught pieces of a conversation about our parenting. In it, I overheard my mom say, “She’s so selfless” referring to me more than once. Hearing it second-hand made it so much more real than if she said it to me directly. There’s a parenting technique of “gossiping” to your spouse or children’s toys where you tell them how great the kid is so that they overhear you but you aren’t directly addressing them. I doubt my mom was doing that on purpose – I’m not three years old – but it had the same effect. Hearing that my little slip-ups haven’t tarnished my overall parenting was a relief.

Now, when I screw up – which is of course, inevitable – I’m going to try to hear my mom’s proud tone instead my judgmental one. I would never say the things I think to myself to someone else, so why do I judge myself that way? Instead, I need to approach my failings with the same grace and patience I try to extend to others.

I also need to remember that parenting – and life in general – is a learning experience, which inherently involves failing. Last week, I said to Chris, “I don’t feel at all like an adult. I certainly didn’t graduate adult school.” To which he responded, “Well, yeah. Do you know what happens when you graduate adult school?” After a brief pause, I replied, “You die?” Considering the alternative, I don’t want to graduate quite yet – I still have plenty of learning to do.