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True
listening can help your child deal well with emotions
Avinash was
not happy with the way his wife Neena handled their 6-year-old Pranav.
He felt that Pranav's misbehavior, to a large extent, was due to Neena
not spending enough time talking to Pranav. Avinash believed that listening
to children helps in the their development. He also believed that if parents
patiently explained the right behavior to their children, they normally
understood.
This however
is not completely true!
Having seen
Neena run out of patience, Avinash decided to take things in his hands.
On one occasion, he sat down to talk to Pranav. This is how their conversation
went:
Avinash-'How
was your day Pranav?'
Pranav- 'Nikhil
is such a bad boy. He hit me so hard. I am so angry with him. I will not
leave him tomorrow.'
Avinash heard
out Pranav patiently and then explained-'Pranav, you must not get angry
with him. Anger is bad. Tomorrow you must become friends with him again.'
The very next
day Pranav had a big fight with Nikhil. Avinash wondered if listening and
explaining helped in any way!
True listening
involves understanding of feelings
Let us explore,
what is happening in the little conversation above. Is Pranav really being
listened to? Physically yes. However, the process of listening involves
more than just listening to the words literally. True listening entails
that the listener understands the feelings expressed by the speaker. After
understanding the feelings, it is also important to communicate this understanding
of the feelings back to the speaker. Here, Avinash could have done this
with a statement like-' Pranav you really seem to be very angry with Nikhil'.
This way Pranav's feeling is in a way reflected back to him.
This technique
of being able to pick the feeling of the speaker and communicate it back
to him in explicit words is known as reflection of feeling. When the appropriate
feeling is reflected back to the speaker, he feels understood. And the
crux of true listening is that the speaker should feel understood.
Being understood
helps the person think rationally
A meaningful
process takes place after a person feels understood. The energy, which
was being used in the feeling of the intense emotions, gets released and
becomes available for the thinking processes. The 'science' of counseling
believes that every person functions on a fixed amount of energy, which
is used for different activities like feeling, thinking etc. When too much
energy goes into the area of feeling like the intense anger in Pranav's
case, very less is left for the thinking. But when a person is able to
express his feelings freely without being judged, he feels understood and
is ready to think. So Pranav would have been more receptive to his father's
advice if his anger was not judged with a statement like 'you must not
get angry with Nikhil'.
Also, if the
child is heard and understood, then very often the parents do not even
have to give advice. The child then comes up with the correct counsel himself.
For e.g.- if Shruti's complaint of feeling hurt due to her teacher's scolding
is really 'listened to' and understood, she could come up with an
understanding like ' But I was talking in class, naturally the teacher
will be angry'. And of course, Shruti's coming up with this understanding
herself would help her more than the parent explaining that she must have
done something wrong to be reprimanded by the teacher.
Denied emotions
find unhealthy ways of expression
On the flip
side, if the child's feelings are denied in the interaction with the parents,
the intense emotions are not able find release and the child finds other
unhealthy ways of expressing his emotions. In Pranav's case when his anger
was not understood, he tried the unhealthy way of expressing his anger
by fighting with Nikhil again. The following example of a common situation
in homes illustrates this point further: - When a child complains to his
parents that they love his sibling more, his feelings are immediately denied
with a statement like ' You should not feel jealous of your brother/sister'.
The child then finds unhealthy ways of expressing his jealousy by maybe
pinching his brother when the adults are not present.
Before summing
up, I would like to say that, to be able to listen to and understand children
effectively, it is first necessary for parents to accept that it is not
wrong to experience negative feelings (like anger, hurt etc). After accepting
this, it will be much easier for the parents to help their children deal
with the negative emotions in a positive manner. This would go a long way
in facilitating healthy emotional development of the child.
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