Is Your Love for your Homeschooler a Listening Love?
Is your love a listening love?
Edited by Mimi Rothschild, CEO, Learning By Grace, Inc. the leading provider of online Christian educational programs for PreK-12 Homeschoolers.
One of the cardinal principles which we must learn to follow if we expect to maintain and warmth of contact with our children is that when the child shares his problems with us, we must not treated lightly. Regardless of how trivial the matter here’s to the parent, it ought to be of real concern if it is bothering the child. To shrug one’s parental shoulders and insist that this is no problem at all is the quickest and most effective way of saying to your child that we really do not understand or care much about what he has on his mind. It is one way of making sure that the child will not come to the parent the next time he is confronted with a problem. On the other hand, by looking the child in the eye and listening attentively to him while he is telling his story, even if this means stopping in the middle of a task that we had thought was urgent taking him seriously.
Let’s remember, when our sons and daughters want to talk, let them! There is the rather natural adult tendency to interrupt the child with advice giving, suggestions, reminders of what he ought and ought not to have done. The sound of their own voices is sweet to most parents. This course of action may make the parents feel good by inflating his ego and making it possible for him to play the role of a superior, of one who knows all the answers and whose wisdom the child ought to listen. This, however, does not help the child in getting his problem out in the open, in the presence of an understanding, this thing, excepting parent. To interrupt with why in the world did you do that? Or, you ought to know better! Now you listen to me! Simply shuts the child up in ruins the confidential relationship, which might have developed.
When we write of the inadvisability of lecturing a child when he wants to talk to the parent, we can do so with conviction! Recently recently, my nephew was trying to confess in misdemeanor with a desperate hope that his father would understand. In the midst of the sons pouring out his rather surprising and exciting story, the father could not resist the temptation to lecture. When he finished, the sons only reply was, “Yes sir, boss!” He never finished his story. This spoke volumes to the father who is now much more careful about dispensing his lectures and who works hard not being shocked if anything is child wants to share. Often our sons and daughters come to us in the first place because they feel guilty and unworthy: they have not come to listen to shocked and upset parents deliver a diatribe which underscores their feeling of guilt.
Have you noticed that in areas where there is heavy and confusing traffic, there is often a safety zone provided to protect the pedestrian? Just so, children need safety zones when the pressures of their emotions become bewildering. The chance to verbally blow off steam to a listening parent if they needed safety zone when the youngster is confronted with a complex accompanying the process of growing up.
When the child is faced with a baffling situation, nothing is quite as therapeutic as having the opportunity to talk his problem out with someone who is ready to be the latest in. Even when there is no particular problem to be solved, big youngster needs an interested list there who doesn’t mind halting what he is doing long enough to hear the detailed description of what happened at school today or if a new friend at Sunday school. Parents need to take this time to say to the child, “I am interested in what you are doing. You are important to me. I’m glad to share your feelings.”
It does sometimes take pleading with oneself to accept a child’s emotions when he is expressing them verbally, but it pays off big dividends in the child’s best emotional development. All of us of our children. Is yours a listening love?
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