Listening – An Awfully Under-rated Parenting Superpower

“My 14 year old daughter has got into some friendships which I don’t think are all that good for her.  We are close and she tells me everything.  I’m just not sure how I should respond when she tells me some of the stuff that is going on?”

Knowing when to offer your opinion, and when to just listen is one of the more challenging parenting moments.  As your child gets older, you will feel this impulse to interfere or do something to “protect” them.  At least sometimes, you will know that it doesn’t make sense to act on that feeling.  They no longer need your help in the way they did when they were four!  But how do you know when to unleash your “Mumma Bear”, and when to hang back?

Your relationship is good

It sounds like you have done a great job building and maintaining closeness and connection with your daughter. I’m sure she isn’t telling you everything, but you are in the wonderful position that she’s telling you enough that you know (more or less) what is going on in her life.

 

“Mumma Bear” response is strong – but inflexible

You are at an interesting stage of parenting. We parents are driven by a very deep desire to protect our children, to prevent them from coming to harm, and to fix things up if we think harm has been done. This is an almost biological urge, an instinct.

The problem is that because it is driven by instinct, our “Mumma (or Pappa) Bear” response is a very rigid, inflexible response. We aren’t adjusting for the particular circumstances of the situation: how old is our child? Are they actually asking for help? What’s the state of our relationship with them? If things are tense between us, how will our child receive or accept any “advice” or intervention we are offering? And, most importantly, how are we feeling?

This instinctive drive to fix-things-up is one of our “Parenting Achilles Heels” – something that trips us up as we try to move forward in our relationship with our child.

Channelling your own experience

As well, in our parenting, we tend to be channelling our own experiences as a child. Unfortunately, those weren’t always great.

For most of us, as we moved into adolescence, the adults around us tended to do one of two things. Because we looked big, they left us very much alone to work things out for ourselves.

Secondly, if they did intervene, trying to help us, it was often in ways that weren’t all that useful to us. Adults would offer their unsolicited opinion about what we should do. Or would simply take it into their own hands, perhaps unaware of all of the circumstances surrounding the problem.

The problem with advice

Advice giving is tricky at any stage of parenting.

Unfortunately, much advice is unsolicited, and often says more about the advice-giver than about the person to whom the advice is offered.

When we parents move quickly to offering advice, it’s often because we are having strong feelings – not least of which is worry (which quickly morphs into catastrophising, which is another “Parenting Achilles Heel”).

Those strong feelings may also be welling up from our own childhood experiences. This means that our advice is often not well calibrated to what is actually happening now, but rather is driven more by what happened to us in the past..

So when young people do ask for help, they often end up having to manage the feelings of the person who was supposed to be helping them – feelings which have come disguised as advice. This doesn’t help our young people think through what they want for the situation.

The value of simply listening

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have much experience, from our own lives, of how tremendously helpful it is to simply be listened to by someone who cares about us. Parents, I’ve found, tend to chronically underestimate the power of paying simple attention and listening to their child. Having rarely or never experienced it ourselves as young people, how could we understand its value?

If at all humanly possible, say nothing

So, faced with your daughter’s social drama, you might be flooded with memories of your own difficult social dramas, mean girls, and dangerous liaisons. The whole thing may be making you feel very uncomfortable, and you desperately want to fix up whatever problem your daughter is having so that she is happy but also so you don’t feel so bad. I know for myself, it’s a powerful feeling that has me rushing to make suggestions and wanting the whole problem to go away fast.

If this was ever an appropriate response to our children’s social challenges, it is no longer so smart in response to our adolescent child. A wise response, as a friend of mine once said “If at all humanly possible, say nothing.”^[1]

So, when your daughter starts to tell you about her social troubles, you could decide to hold yourself back from offering your feelings, your “opinions”, or from immediately intervening. You decide you won’t ring the other child’s parent to complain, or ban your child from contact with her troublesome friends, or give her advice about how she could respond to their taunts or other social difficulties, etc.

It’s harder than it sounds

If this is what you decide to do, chances are you’ll have a LOT of feelings. It can feel quite excruciating when we resist the temptation to jump in,.

It will help if you can find some way to vent about all this, out of earshot of your daughter. Find someone who you can tell how much you want (for instance) to eliminate the friend from your daughter’s life etc. Listening Partners are really good for this sort of thing.

Save your interventions for the really important issues

Every time you intervene to set a limit – you use up “connection credits” in the Relationship Bank Account you have with your child. If your relationship is in good shape (i.e plenty of Connection Credits in the bank) you have more room to bring limits without damaging your relationship with your child. (There will also be more room for you to make mistakes without it being a disaster – good for those times when you don’t keep your mouth shut 🙂)

In adolescence also, children sometimes have a less robust sense of connection with us – they’ve got a lot going on, and (hopefully) it’s not all about you!

Because of this, you do well to save your interventions for absolute issues of safety, so that when you do wade in – set a limit, offer advice – you both know it’s important.

Make space for listening

If you can, keep making opportunities for communication; with teens, lots of 1 on 1 driving in the car seems to work well. Your job is to listen when they choose to tell you something. Maybe ask the odd open ended question: “What do you think is going on for her?”, “What would you like to do about that?”. If your teen asks you what you think, don’t be prescriptive – she needs to figure it out for herself, and if you give advice she can’t implement, it will make it harder for her to tell you what is going on.

Just Listen. It’s an awfully underrated parenting superpower.

No need to go it alone!

Madeleine loves to help: why not book a Free 20 Minute Consultation, and she can help direct you to the best resources and support.

Endnotes:

[1] I hunted high and low for photo’s of adults really listening to older young people, or saying nothing but could not find much. Looking for photo’s for these articles is an interesting excercise – it turns out that getting the right picture is quite difficult – pictures contain so much information, and it’s hard to get just the right emphasis. For this article, I found a LOT of photos where it was obvious that the adults were “leading the way” or, basically, telling the young people what to do. I guess this highlights how difficult it is, in my culture at least, to really listen to and follow the lead of young people. Mostly, we seem to be talking at them. [back to article]

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