COUPLES
JAN, 2024
Communication with Children
ANA TEMPELSMAN
Communication with Children
By Ana Tempelsman and Silvia Salinas.
Communication is at the heart of human interaction. It allows us to express ourselves, make contact, and listen to one another. What sustains love and builds a good relationship is having genuine encounters with the other person. However, communication between parents and children is not always good.
Listening to Oneself
The current crisis in family relationships, bonds, and partnerships is deeply linked to a lack of contact. Fundamentally, the root of this problem lies in a disconnection with oneself. Communication is more about listening than speaking. Often, people do not listen to themselves. When one’s own needs are not recognized, individual problems obstruct the way. When parents do not pay attention to their own emotions, it is difficult for them to be available for their children.
On the other hand, children are very attentive to how their parents behave. They seek a model that shows them how to face life and solve problems. When parents shut down, do not listen, do not talk about their emotions, repress what happens to them, or get angry and yell, children learn to do the same. They assimilate more through identification than through what they are told. It is important to realize that parents transmit a lot through actions and inactions that shape their children’s personalities.
Developing the Ability to Receive
Listening means being open and available. It means being interested in what is happening to the other person. We all feel more valued when the people we love pay attention to us. Often, communication fails because parents do not want to listen but rather to impart. They talk to their children to tell them what to do and feel, leaving no space for the children to express themselves. Under these conditions, dialogue cannot result in true contact.
One underlying reason for this behavior is that sometimes parents cannot tolerate hearing what their children have to say, especially when it relates to the parents’ decisions or attitudes (such as a separation, a fight between parents, or even missing a child’s soccer game). Other times, children do not meet the expectations parents had for how they should be. A patient we worked with for a long time could not tolerate seeing his son’s fear and weakness. He had a deeply rooted belief that a man should be strong, as his father had demanded of him. Seeing his son’s fear connected him to his own fear. He eventually understood that forcing his son to repress a part of himself was very harmful.
The Pain of Not Being Seen
Being able to listen to and validate children’s feelings, even when we do not like or find them painful, is extremely important. Children need approval from others, especially their parents. If they feel that expressing themselves will lead to being disqualified or angering their parents, they learn to repress their feelings. They do not receive the presence and contact they need and begin to feel the pain of not being seen or recognized. The reality is that many parents cannot give the presence they themselves did not receive.
As children realize they are not accepted as they are, they distance themselves from their true selves. They start to distrust their own feelings because they do not align with what others expect of them. They feel that their feelings are inadequate and must be hidden. Thus, they begin to construct an alternative personality to be accepted and loved.
The problem is that by doing this, they forget what they feel and who they are. Here lies the greatest pain, which always underlies any other pain: the feeling of not being loved for who we are and the suffering caused by disconnection – the lack of communication – with our true self.
The Difficulties of Listening
One of the most challenging aspects is truly seeing the other person’s perspective, especially when it involves different generations. The way of looking at the world is so different that it requires a genuine effort to understand what is happening to our children.
Listening means being genuinely interested in what is happening to the other person, without preconceived notions. It is as if we were listening to a stranger we wish to understand from their perspective, not ours. However, our listening mechanism is often very different, and not just with our children. When the other person begins to speak, our own thoughts about what they are saying already start to push in, and we stop paying attention to listen to our “internal commentator.” Often, we listen halfway, imagining we already know the rest of what they will say, simply waiting our turn to speak. Then, we compare their ideas with ours and quickly conclude that the other person is wrong or that our ideas are better. With this conclusion in mind, we want to help them. Helping the other means, in our language, convincing them they are wrong and that they should think as we do. All “for their own good.” At this point, the dialogue has already died, and conscious or unconscious anger begins, one feeling misunderstood and the other annoyed that their child does not accept their well-intentioned advice.
In reality, children often seek to be listened to, paid attention to, understood, and allowed to express themselves. They also seek help in finding a solution. They never want decisions to be made for them or to be given a sermon about what they should do. There are ways to close the heart, and when the heart is closed, the ears do not hear. For the heart to open, we need to feel and convey that we are more interested in listening than in proving that they are wrong. The dialogue should help children find their own path rather than forcing them to follow “our truth.”
The Adult Must Be There for the Child
We worked with a separated woman in therapy who found it very difficult to step away from her own emotions and anger to listen to her seven-year-old son. One time, the father, who was supposed to pick him up from school, arrived an hour late. That night, the boy approached his mother, sad, worried, feeling unimportant, and anxious because he thought his dad wouldn’t come. He wanted to tell her what had happened. Our patient told us that she immediately started yelling, “Your dad is a disaster, I can’t believe it, he can’t be trusted, the one thing I ask him, and he’s late…etc.”
We can all understand her anger. But if we pay attention to what happened to the child, we see that he sought comfort and needed to express his fear. He went to someone he felt would listen. Instead of focusing on what happened to the child and what he wanted to convey, the mother focused on her anger. Not only did she fail to console her son, but she also spoke badly of his father, something terrible for anyone.
Situations like these, more frequent than we realize, teach children that if they are afraid, it is better not to express it because it will cause anger and conflict between their parents. They learn that what happens to them is not that important.
We need to step away from our ego and listen to the other person. Think, “What is he trying to convey with this?” Care about what is happening to them, about what they are saying, and try not to mix it with what is happening to us at that moment. The adult must be there for the child, we told our patient. If her son comes to her hurt by something, it is important that she finds a way to help him. It is not the time to express her own anger because this is how communication is discouraged, and children end up distancing themselves.
Listening is an Act of Love
Good and Bad Communication
Achieving a good encounter with children is often a complex task. To show children that we are listening to them, it is good to:
– Pay attention to their ways of expressing themselves.
– Help them identify their emotions and accept them.
– Help them identify their problems and trust that they will find their own path and the best solution.
– Have a good attitude, take the time to listen to them, and pay real attention.
On the other hand, it is never advisable to:
– Criticize the children.
– Impose solutions or tell them what they should do.
– Threaten or punish them for having difficult emotions (this does not mean letting them act any way they want; it is possible to tell a child that we accept and understand they are angry but that they are not allowed to break objects or hit their sibling).
– Minimize what happens to them, telling them they should not feel bad about something so small and insignificant.