Listen carefully, very carefully

REFLECTIVE listening — listening in such a way that the child’s experience is acknowledged and validated — is something we all think we do as parents.

But the reality is often different, says parent coach Val Mullally.

Mullally says reflective listening creates an environment where your child “feels felt”. She says we can massively influence our level of listening by being aware of the space we create between us. “Is it polluted, clean or sparkling?”

Parents can obstruct the listening pathway by:

* Trying to fix child’s problem. Child says: ‘I’ve got no friends at school’. Parent says: ‘I’m sure you could play with Susie’.

“The moment we come up with a solution, the story is ours, not the child’s,” says Mullally.

* Judging. Child says: ‘Teacher shouted at me’.

Parent replies: ‘What did you do?’ — negating child’s experience.

Child says: ‘I don’t like peas’. Parent says: ‘Of course you like peas.

Key for parents is to be able to park what’s going on for themselves. “I have to park my judgement, my need to fix, my own agenda around what I want to rush off and do. I need to be fully present with my heart, not just my head. This shows in words but also in my body language and eye contact. All should give the message ‘I am here for you’.”

She acknowledges that listening all the time at that level is impossible. “Use your intuition to know when your child really needs you to focus on listening. If he says ‘I don’t want to go to school’, you’d listen reflectively by responding ‘you don’t want to go to school — tell me more’. So you’re keeping the space open. You’re letting him know his experience is being acknowledged. Very often as he talks it through he’ll find his own solution.”

We can’t expect to be good at reflective listening if we don’t first practise it. Mullally recommends doing so for five minutes daily. You ask your child: ‘How was your day?’ He replies: ‘Good’. “If you move onto the next thing, you lose a wonderful opportunity to practise reflective listening, to let your child experience a parent being totally present for them.”

* Val Mullally will run an eight-week evening course on parenting in the autumn. A key element will be developing reflective listening skills. Details to be posted on www.koemba.com