Listening well, p.13
Listening Well, page 13
Often at the funerals for stillborn babies I attended in the course of my work at the hospital, siblings would be brought along with the parents. On many occasions I witnessed the parents supporting each other as a young child looked on. Lost, forlorn, overwhelmed by the chapel with its sad row of small white coffins, and by dozens of strangers also struck down by grief. One of the social workers in attendance would always be on hand to swoop down on a distressed child to provide comfort, supporting parents to envelop that child into their circle. On many occasions, with the permission of the parents, the social worker would take the sibling back into the chapel after the service and explain why they were there, on this, the first Wednesday of the month. The child might be invited to light a candle for the brother or sister they never got to meet. Training, compassion, simply being decent human beings enabled these wonderful professionals to make a difference.
I know we are told to talk to children in an “age-appropriate” manner, but we must be alert to the children whose age does not marry up with their life lived. Only by listening to them, truly listening to them, can we help them process their thoughts, identify concerns that may arise if their feelings are not validated and acknowledged.
I was lucky to have a great-grandfather and a father who listened to me and whom I loved to listen to. Sadly, my mother, as I have said, very seldom made herself available to me to talk to, nor felt the need to talk to me in any meaningful way. This situation did not change when I became an adult, and a mother myself. I resolved to be the opposite with my own daughter—and to take every opportunity I could to engage with young people.
Growing up, my brothers and I took the lead from our parents. However, as adults, we talk and share our lives constantly. Other than my immediate family, it will always be one of my brothers I now turn to when I need someone to listen to me. They in turn reach out to me. When I look in the mirror, I realize it is my turn to be the older, sometimes wiser, person in the lives of not only the young people in my life, but any young person with whom I am privileged to speak.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been published in a Young Adult edition, something of which I am extremely proud. Visiting schools and speaking to teenagers is for me pure joy. To be in a room with one hundred or so fourteen-year-olds who pay me the respect of listening to me intently is truly humbling. I know they have been listening because of the amazing questions they ask. As they gather around me at the end of my talk, instead of going to their next class, I send up a quiet “thank you” to Lale Sokolov for having told me his story, so that I can pass it on to a new generation.
It is not only older people whose stories have had a profound impact on my life. Many years ago, I came into contact with a teenage boy in the hospital with a terminal illness. To pass the time during treatment, he played games on a handheld gaming device. I was told he had mastered all the levels of the games he had. A quick phone call to the company who designed and sold the games resulted in an offer of two new unreleased games. A young man, a designer from the company, turned up in the social work department to deliver them. We got chatting and he told me he wanted an excuse to leave the office, so had decided to hand-deliver the games rather than mail them. Instead of taking them from him, I arranged for the social worker looking after the teenager to take the visitor to the ward so he could hand them to the patient personally.
What transpired from this meeting between a terminally ill patient and a game designer was a friendship of profound beauty. Several times the designer turned up in my office on his way to the ward to thank me for putting him in touch with this boy. He told me about his privileged life, that he had never known children could get so sick they might die. He met the boy’s family and other teenagers in the ward. His life had been changed, he told me, by having his eyes opened to the tragedy of young people spending long periods in the hospital, undergoing painful treatment. He was overwhelmed by their positive attitudes to their illnesses and the hope they and their families clung to for remission, for recovery. He himself had opened up to the patients, shared information about himself, showed his own vulnerability. He had become a regular visitor, so at ease with the patients that they played practical jokes on him. He remained connected to the teenager, to the end, and their friendship was a great comfort to them both.
Practical Tips for Listening to Children
Here are some thoughts around listening to children that might be useful. They apply not only to our children, of course, but to any young person we might encounter. The essential thing is to be an active listener: pay attention, respect the child talking to you, respect what is being said, no matter how trivial or unimportant it seems to you. I can only repeat: if you don’t listen to the small stuff, you may not be told the big stuff.
Time—that’s the secret to listening to a child. And taking the time to listen to a child when they are little is the key to a close and secure relationship, which pays dividends during the more challenging years of adolescence. I understand that it’s not always possible to drop what you are doing in the midst of a busy life, but if you want your child to know how important they are to you, if you want to give them confidence and self-esteem, you need to find the time to listen to them.
When my three kids were small, I was a busy working mother. In between work, school pickup, cooking tea, supervising homework, and throwing the clothes in the wash there wasn’t a lot of time for those one-to-one moments. I knew that, the kids knew that—we managed. But if I sensed one of them had something on their mind, and there was no immediate opportunity to sit down to listen, I used to find the best thing was to ask them to help me with a routine task. It’s surprising what a child will tell you when you are folding laundry together, or watering the garden, or setting the table.
Teachers often single out a child they are concerned about and ask them for special help—preparing a display of work, for instance, or sorting out the books in a classroom. Not only does this make the child feel important, it’s an opportunity to allow them to speak without addressing their concerns directly. You can do something like this at home. The key thing is to keep the focus on the job at hand, however trivial, to create a neutral safe space—and not to make direct eye contact. If the child falters or lapses into silence, you can always return to the work you are doing to give them time to gather their thoughts and confidence: “Now, how many more pins do I need here?,” “We’ve finished the towels, shall we pair the socks?”
I realize that domestic chores don’t cut much ice with most teenagers, so how do you manage then? If you’ve fostered a relationship of trust with your child from an early age, you should have a firm basis on which to negotiate the trickier years of adolescence. However, as teenagers widen their social circles and begin to rely on their peers rather than their parents for emotional support and validation, it can be challenging to keep the conversation going. However hard it is, and however many unrewarding grunts you get in response to a simple question like “how was school today?”—keep going! The work you put in now will pay dividends in the relationship you build with them as adults.
Try to create a situation in which your children speak, and you are “present” to listen. For us, it was the table and the talkie thing that worked for the whole family, but there are other ways of getting a child or teenager alone in a situation in which they might speak. The car is good—you are together, but you are both looking straight ahead. For six years I drove my daughter to her high school every morning. We had to drive past the police academy and would see the recruits training outside. Often, we commented on the force as a profession. My daughter joked that she liked seeing them running around the track or out on the street, that being an athlete, she could do that part of the job. Six years after leaving school, working, and traveling, she was sworn in as a police officer.
Top Tips for Listening to Your Children:
Find an activity you can share together.
Avoid direct eye contact.
Ask open-ended questions.
If the conversation stalls, return to the job at hand to allow the child time to gather themselves and then go back to an earlier point in the story and ask a factual question to show that you’ve listened.
Pay attention to the way you hold yourself physically. Avoid folding your arms and keep your body movements slow and deliberate.
If your child wants to tell you something and you just aren’t able to listen then and there, plan a moment when you can—and make sure they know they will have your undivided attention then. You might say, “I really want to hear about that—how about you and I make tea together later?”
Avoid a prescriptive response. If your child wants to tell you about a specific problem, ask them what they think the best solution might be. If they persist in asking for advice, offer a few suggestions and ask them to choose. Praise the choice they make.
Don’t forget to ask them about how they are feeling about what they have told you. When they have finished, make sure they have said everything they needed to say.
Not everything has to be serious. You can use gentle humor in your responses, but not sarcasm—it’s never helpful.
Never dismiss what your child is telling you. Their worries may seem unimportant or ridiculous to you, but they are important to them—and they have chosen to share them with you. Honor their trust.
As psychotherapist Philippa Perry says, all behavior is a form of communication, right down to toddler tantrums. So try to listen and respond to that behavior. What has triggered it and what might they be trying to tell you?
A child doesn’t always pick the “right” moment to tell you something. Do your best to acknowledge what they are saying, no matter what the circumstances. Do your best to listen, or if that’s not possible, then ask if they can tell you later. But you might find that when you try to re-create “the moment” it has passed.
Pick your battles—this is the “pajamas don’t matter” rule and it applies whether you are dealing with a toddler insisting on wearing their rain boots to school on a hot summer’s day or a teenager pushing the boundaries of what you will allow them to do. The key question is always safety, isn’t it? And does it really matter?
Be open and prepared for what you might hear—it mightn’t be what you’d hoped, wanted—it might involve an admission that you are surprised or even upset by.
Equally, be prepared to be surprised by a completely different interpretation of a particular event or situation—you might find that you are criticized, or accused of behavior in a way that feels unfair or unreasonable, but it’s very important to listen. Above all, try not to react with anger.
DO NOT JUDGE. Or keep those judgments to yourself, at least until you’ve had time to temper your response.
With younger children, try to make the conversations inspiring. I might try to follow up my grandson’s explanation of gravity with a story about the simplicity of my childhood, or his father’s as a way of encouraging him to think about how much the world has changed.
Listen carefully to what a child might be trying to tell you behind a particular story or anecdote.
Remember to practice those active listening skills—they apply to any situation in which you are the listener, regardless of the age of the child.
5
Listening to Ourselves
The world is giving you answers each day. Learn to listen.
Listening to ourselves. Easier said than done, isn’t it? What do I mean by this? Later, I’ll discuss the cost of listening, and the importance of making sure that we listen to our own responses, that we practice self-care, that we do not make what we hear into our own problems or trauma. Here, I am talking about trusting our instincts when we are listening, and learning to trust ourselves.
A key element of being a good listener, being a support to others, is having a good and solid relationship with yourself. You need to treat yourself like a good and reliable friend, otherwise how can you offer that same friendship to others? Essential to this is remembering always to be kind to yourself—if you’re not, then who will be? The point is that we can’t help others, understand others, if we don’t do this for ourselves. We all have those moments of self-doubt, self-blame, shame: “I shouldn’t have said that,” “I should have listened properly to what someone was trying to tell me,” “I sounded silly when I suggested that.” And in those moments, it’s important to do what you would with a friend—tell yourself to forget it, move on, you were doing your best. I think this last point is worthy of repeating: you can only do the best you can at any given point on any given day. Guilt and self-blame are only ever negative thoughts.
During my years working in the social work department at the hospital, I connected daily to patients, their families, their friends. They presented often during tragic and traumatic times in their lives, and as office manager, I was often the first person they saw. I am not trained as a social worker, but my boss called me “the occasional counselor.” I am in awe of the social work profession. I witnessed so many times the difference social workers can make in supporting a person through the worst times of their lives. The death of a much-loved partner, of a parent, a sibling, a dear friend. However, it was the loss of newborns, which sadly I saw many times, that I carry in my heart and in my head. And will do for the remainder of my days.
I write about this aspect of my life because there was barely a week of my twenty years’ work in the hospital that I was not involved in the death of a baby, be it through miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal death. I began this chapter reflecting on how we should listen to ourselves and protect ourselves from others’ grief. There were many times when I did not do this for myself and I am eternally grateful to the hospital staff who helped me manage my own feelings, particularly my boss, who took great care to remind me of my role in these families’ lives—to listen, empathize, and make a difference, no matter how small.
What I remember most about my time involved in the perinatal loss program was the little things that at the time seemed inconsequential but had a profound impact. As I have mentioned earlier, once a month, the hospital held a funeral/memorial service for the babies lost in the past four weeks. I assisted with the administration, in conjunction, with the chaplains, funeral directors and the cemetery. On most first Wednesdays of the month, I attended the service. Twelve times a year over twenty years adds up to a lot of first Wednesdays of the month!
Knowing what those of us involved had to manage on these Wednesdays at 10 a.m. never got easier. A new month. New families. Sometimes families we’d met before who were saying farewell to a second baby. Sometimes, I had already met the parents; sometimes I hadn’t. Often, I would meet them when they brought to the department clothing, tokens of love, mementos, photographs they wanted placed in the coffin with their baby. I would receive them, assuring the parents of the care we would take in placing these special objects with their baby, that their baby would be dressed in these precious garments. On many occasions I did this personally. Talking to the baby as I dressed him or her, I would tell them who the people in the photo were; that they were being given a drawing their three-year-old sister/brother had made for them; that this was a flower their mother had picked from her garden that morning; I would read them the letter their grandmother wrote, telling them who their family were, where they were from, and how they would be loved and remembered.
Out of all the mementos and gifts I placed in a coffin, one stands out for me and flooded back to me recently when my five-year-old grandson showed me his first marbles and asked me to play with him. A grieving mother and father stood in front of me and I listened as the mother handed me several items, explaining what they were and why she wanted them placed with her baby. The little jacket she had knitted was way too big for her prematurely born baby, but it was the first thing she had made for her expected firstborn and she wanted him to have it. Her partner stood beside her, his head down, pain at hearing his partner, between sobs, explain the significance of each item, etched on his face. He had one of his hands in his pocket and I could hear something clicking. As his wife dissolved into tears, he hugged her and then looking over her shoulder, he removed his hand from his pocket and looked at me: in his hand were two marbles.
“These are the first two marbles my father gave me. I had many as a boy, lost some, won others, but I never risked losing these. I wanted to teach my son how to play marbles. Would you please take one, choose one, your choice, and give it to my son? I’ll keep the other.” As I reached out to take one, he closed his fist and his eyes briefly before opening them and letting me take one of the marbles. I chose the blue one, leaving him with the yellow—I don’t know why.
Two years later, that father reappeared in my office, his yellow marble in one hand, cell phone in the other, the biggest smile on his face. He came to show me the photos of his newborn daughter, hours old. He had brought the marble into the hospital with him when his wife went into labor. He told me I had chosen the right marble—he felt the yellow one was more suited to his new baby girl.
How does this story connect to this chapter? The first time I met this father, and during my interaction with him, including taking the marble from his hand, I remained silent. There were no words I could say that would help this man. He had all he needed right then and there, with his partner in his arms. They walked away from me without a backward glance. As they should. I had listened to myself: there was nothing I could do or say right then that was going to make a scrap of difference to the pain this couple was living through. I did what they asked me to do: choose the marble. On the second occasion we met, I listened again, but this time I gave him a hug. It felt like the right thing to do. Again, there weren’t really words to express what he had told me. My instincts told me that physical contact was not only appropriate for him, but also for me—he had reached out and taken the trouble to come and tell me this wonderful piece of news and so I reached out in response. This type of physical contact between staff and a patient’s family member was not encouraged, or probably considered professional, but there are times when it seemed to be the right thing, the human thing to do. I’d like to think—no, I believe—in this instance it was right.
