Listening Skills?

How much listening do you actually do?

Every day we hear thousands of things, some in the background, many that we are supposedly attending to, some that we actively listen to. We expect the children in our care to listen to instructions, filter out the important sounds from the rest and then do what they have been told. In the background they also have conversations of their own and ambient noises to deal with. We tell them they must listen, but how well do we train them to know what they must listen to?

Hearing is an extremely acute sense. It is generally understood that it is the last sense to disappear, and that unconscious patients can still hear sounds and voices. Hearing is an evocative sense, and most basically acts as an alarm system for danger, alerting us and preparing the body for fight or flight. That’s why a sharp sound will make our hearts race and unexpected noises in the night spring us into alertness. Even someone adding your name when speaking to you will naturally increase your attention.

However, in the visually rich culture we live in now, how do we give our children the opportunity to develop this valuable sense? Listening is the ability to process what is heard using the brain’s conscious rather than automatic functions. If we allow children to see that we are only half- listening to them, if they think we are constantly listening to the same music, if we fill their lives with artificial noise then we are limiting the discriminatory powers that intelligent listening can give them.

To develop listening skills it is important to enable some peace to hear the sounds that naturally surround us. For me, providing constant external sound from the radio, TV, or MP3 player runs the risk of reducing my thinking, and cuts off the relationship with the outside world. Some people feel they need the noise to help them work, or use the sound to act as company, but try a morning without extra sound, just a patch of peace and quiet to see how background noise can calm you and help to reduce the pressure of noise keeping you busy. Creating a bit of peace and quiet also enables us to hear our own inner voice; to listen to ourselves!

It is worth training children’s listening skills, taking the time to listen to the sounds around and to talk about them, to teach them to look at the person speaking and to engage in meaningful conversation, and to actually take time away from the multitasking madness of our visual world to listen, uninterrupted to something new – a piece of music, a story, or a different style of each.

I know that I am guilty of doing other things whilst people are talking to me, and have learnt (the hard way!) that I am not really capable of taking in sufficient information that way – but I also know that we all do this to children, from hearing reading whilst busy ourselves to just sidestepping the constant bubbling ideas that flow from a happy child, and so, naturally, our children learn from us that listening is something that can be happily compromised. To make things worse we then get cross if they don’t listen to us barking instructions.

So how about making an effort to listen to things together, and making time to enjoy the sounds around you? Make space for a family conversation, listen to something new rather than the same old music, and take those earphones out so that listening can be a valuable shared experience. A game that children will enjoy is the ‘add an instruction’ game (although they will love any game that guarantees your attention) by sending them several instructions to remember and follow before returning successfully to you. Start with one (for example: run upstairs and bring me a hairbrush) then add one more instruction at a time (for example: run upstairs and fetch me a hairbrush and then go to the kitchen and get me a spoon before returning) and then let them dictate the terms to you for you to have a go. You may think this is just training the memory, but ‘not remembering’ is often just an excuse to cover up the fact that real intelligent listening didn’t take place. 

Happy listening!