Chapter 5 - How to Listen to Kids Too Young to Talk Much.

Many parents ask: "While I see Active Listening can work wonders with children three and four years old and older, what can we do with infants and toddlers who don't talk?"

Or, "I see how we must rely much more on our children's inner capacities to work through their own problems helped by Active Listening. But younger children don't have problem-solving skills, so don't we have to solve most of their problems for them?"

It is a misperception that Active Listening is useful only for children old enough to talk. Using active listening with younger children does require some additional understanding about nonverbal communication and how parents can effectively respond to the nonverbal messages younger children send them. Furthermore, parents of very young children often think that just because these children are dependent on adults for many of their needs, infants and toddlers have very little capacity to work out their own solutions to problems they encounter early in life.

This, too, just is not so.

What Are Infants Like?

First, infants have needs like older children and adults. And they have their share of problems getting those needs met. They get cold, hungry, uncomfortably wet, tired, thirsty, frustrated, sick. Helping infants with such problems poses some special problems for parents.

Second, infants and very young children are extremely dependent upon their parents for the gratification of their needs or for providing them solutions to their problems. Their inner resources and capabilities are limited. A hungry infant has never been known to walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and pour himself a glass of milk.

Third, infants and very young children do not have a well-developed capability of communicating their needs through verbal symbols. They do not yet have the language to share their problems and needs with others. Much of the time, parents are quite perplexed about what is going on inside pre-verbal children, because babies don't go around clearly announcing that they have a need for affection or for releasing gas from their stomach.

Fourth, infants and very young children frequently may not even "know" themselves what is bothering them. This is because so many of their needs are physiological- that is, problems caused by deprivation of their physical needs (hunger, thirst, pain, and so on). Also, because of their undeveloped cognitive and language skills, they may not be able to figure out what problems they are experiencing.

Helping very young children meet their needs and solve their problems is therefore somewhat different from helping older children. But not as different as most parents think.

Tuning In to Needs and Problems of Infants

Much as parents might wish that infants would resourcefully meet their own needs and solve their own problems, it is frequently up to a parent to see that little Nicky gets enough to eat, is dry, stays warm, gets affection, and the like. The problem is: how does the parent find out what is bothering a fussy, whining infant?

Most parents "go by the book"- what the parent has read about the needs, of infants in general. No doubt Dr. Benjamin Spock has been a great boon to parents by providing them with information about infants and their needs and things parents can do to insure that these needs are gratified. Yet, as any parent knows, not everything is covered by Dr. Spock. To be effective in helping a particular child with his own unique needs and problems, a parent is obliged to acquire an understanding of that child. He does this chiefly through accurate listening to his child's messages, nonverbal though they may be.

A very young child's parent must learn to listen accurately just as much as parents of older children. It is a different kind of listening, principally because infants communicate non-verbally.

An infant starts crying at 5:3o A.M. Obviously, he has a problem- something is wrong, he has a need, he wants something. He cannot send a verbal message to the parent, "I feel very uncomfortable and upset." Therefore, the parent cannot use Active Listening as we have previously described it ("You feel uncomfortable, you are bothered by something"). The child obviously would not understand.

The parent does get a nonverbal message (crying) and he must go through the process of "decoding" it if he is to find out what is going on inside the child. Because the parent cannot utilize verbal feedback to check on the accuracy of his decoding, he must use a nonverbal or behavioral feedback method.

The parent might first throw a blanket over the child (decoding the child's crying as "He is feeling cold"). But the child keeps on crying ("You have not yet understood my message"). Then the parent picks the child up and rocks him (Now decoding, "He is scared by a dream"). The child continues to cry ("That's not what I am feeling'). Finally, the parent puts a bottle of milk in the infant's mouth ("He is feeling hungry") and after a few sucks the child stops crying. ("That's what I meant- I was feeling hungry- you finally understood me.")

Being an effective parent of a very young child, as with an older child, depends to a great extent upon the accuracy of communication between parent and child. And the principal responsibility for developing accurate communication in this relationship rests with the parent. He must learn to decode accurately the nonverbal behavior of the infant before making a determination of what is bothering him. He must also utilize the same feedback process for the purpose of checking on the accuracy of his decoding. This feedback process also can be called Active Listening; it is the same mechanism we described in the communication process with more verbal children. But with a child who sends a nonverbal message (crying), the parent must use a nonverbal feedback (bottle in the mouth).

This necessity for this kind of effective two-way communication partially explains why it is so critical in the first two years of a child's life for his parents to spend a lot of time with him. A parent gets to "know" his child better than anyone else- that is, the parent develops skill in decoding the infant's nonverbal behavior and hence becomes more able than anyone else to know what to do to satisfy the child's needs or provide solutions to his problems.

Everyone has had the experience of being unable to decode the behavior of a friend's child. We ask, "What does he mean when he rattles the slats of the playpen? He must want something." The mother replies, "Oh, he always does that when he is getting sleepy. Our first child tugged at his blanket when he got sleepy."

Using Active Listening to Help Infants

Too many parents of infants do not bother to use Active Listening to check on the accuracy of their decoding process. They jump in and take some kind of action to help the child without finding out what is really bothering him.

Michael stands up in his crib and begins to whimper, then to cry loudly. Mother sets him back down and hands him his rattle. Michael stops crying for a moment, then knocks the rattle out of the crib and onto the floor, and begins to cry even more loudly. Mother picks up the rattle and firmly puts it into Michael's hand, saying harshly, "If you throw it out again, you won't get it back." Michael keeps crying and again knocks the rattle out of the crib. Mother slaps his hand. Michael really howls now.

This mother made an assumption that she knew what the baby needed, but she failed to "hear" the baby "tell" her that her decoding was inaccurate. As with many parents, this mother did not keep at it long enough to complete the communication process. She did not make certain that she understood what the child needed or wanted. The child remained frustrated and the mother became angry. In this way are sown the seeds of a deteriorating relationship and an emotionally unhealthy child.

Obviously, the younger the child, the less the parent can bank on the child's own resources or capabilities. This means that more parent intervention (or inputs) will be required in the problem-solving process of younger children.

Everybody knows that parents have to prepare the formula, change the diapers, cover the child up, disentangle him from his blanket, move him, raise him, rock him, cuddle him, and the thousands of other things necessary to see to it that his needs are not being thwarted. Again, this means time with the child- and lots of it. Those early years require the almost constant presence of the parent. The infant needs his parents, and needs them desperately. This is why pediatricians so strongly insist on parents being around during those first few formative years when the child is so very helpless and dependent.

Yet being around is not enough in itself. The critical factor is the parent's effectiveness in listening accurately to the nonverbal communication of the child so that he understands what is going on inside and can effectively give the child what he needs when he needs it.

Failure of many child-rearing specialists to understand this has resulted in a great deal of poor research and some incorrect interpretations of research findings in the field of child development. Numerous research studies have been launched to demonstrate the superiority of one method versus another- bottle feeding versus breast, demand feeding versus scheduled, early toilet training versus late, early weaning versus late, strictness versus leniency. For the most part, these studies have failed to take into account the wide differences in the needs of various children and the extreme differences among parents in their effectiveness in receiving their children's communications.

Whether a child is weaned early or late, for example, may not be the important factor in influencing his later personality or mental health. Rather it is whether his parent listens accurately to the messages that particular child is sending every day about his particular eating needs, so that the parent can then have the flexibility to move in with solutions that truly satisfy his needs. Accurate listening, then, may result in weaning one child late, another early, and perhaps a third child somewhere in between. I strongly believe the same principle applies to most of the child-rearing practices about which there has been so much controversy- feeding, amount of cuddling, degree of maternal separation, sleeping, toilet training, sucking, and so on. If this principle is valid, then we should say to parents:

"You will be the most effective parent by providing your infant with a home climate in which you will know how to gratify his needs appropriately by using Active Listening to understand the messages that announce specifically what his unique needs are."

Give the Child a Chance to Meet His Needs Himself

Certainly the ultimate goal of most parents should be to help the very young child gradually develop his own resources- to become weaned away from dependence on the parent's resources, more and more capable of meeting his own needs, solving his own problems. The parent who will be most effective in this is the one who can consistently follow the principle of first giving the child a chance to solve his problems himself before jumping in with a parental solution.

In the following illustration, the parent follows this principle quite effectively:

This parent kept the responsibility for solving the problem with the child at all times by avoiding direct intervention or advice. By doing so, the parent is helping the child develop and use his own resources.

Many parents are far too eager to take over their child's problems. They are so anxious to help the child or so uncomfortable (non-accepting) of his experiencing an unfulfilled need that they are compelled to take over the problem-solving and give the child a quick solution. If this is done frequently, it is a sure way of retarding the child's learning how to use his own resources and his developing independence and resourcefulness.