The Great Painful Lesson Feedback Loop
That feeling you had, when you were a kid, that grown-ups didn’t listen to you enough?
You were absolutely right.
However, you were frustrated by being unable to communicate what you wanted to, and unfamiliar with the ways of adults, so you missed the motivational truth: That their ignoring the content of what you said, their brushing it off as oversimple or irrelevant, wasn’t just negative for you. It was just as damaging, or moreso, for them. It was them missing out when they did that, them stunting their emotional growth. It bothered you too, but unless it was severe, you probably got over it, or most of the way over it. They, if they did it, almost certainly will never recover the loss of the lessons they missed out on.
Not listening to children is as damaging to a person as sleeping during all of your high-school classes. Maybe even more damaging, considering a whole person, a lifetime of development.
Here’s why: As we get older, we have a tendency to stop questioning the basic parts of our habits and psychology. We accept things because they’re old, familiar, and just easier not to ask questions about. We accept our habits unless or until something happens that makes that impossible (i.e. we get sick). Life lays on those years and the layers get thick and it’s just hard to reach back to the first ones and screw with things; plus, we wouldn’t have the first idea where to start if we did try.
And lo, the Great One — the same Great One who gave us parents when we had tendencies to get confused, wander into traffic, and get scared and cry — gives us…children. Bright-eyed, loving little question machines, with a mainline into the basics of everyone, and sometimes armed with the kind of insight into you that only something which was genetically half you could possibly have. How bloody coincidental, eh?
And that’s why it’s a sin not to listen to every word a child says, especially your child, and ask yourself seriously every question that they have. Remember that children love in one of the purest ways possible–if not the purest way–and that there can never be malice in their questions. If the answers hurt, then that’s a sign that they’re an important lesson, just like the agonizing lessons of childhood. Who enjoyed losing their first pet, or friend?
You didn’t think the agonizing lessons ended after childhood, did you? Seems to me they go on for much longer than that; at least until death, which seems to be the peak Agonizing Lesson for most of us.
Ignore the mouths of those babes, and you’re crippling your adulthood, hurting your shot at succeeding in whyever you’re here. Those aggravating “why”s and “that’s not fair”s and prods into your personal habits are gifts, opportunities to fine-tune yourself.
And as a bonus, your kids will learn confidence from your attention, and other valuable lessons from watching reason at work in your life.
Man, being a parent makes you preachy.
;)
-PD
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Very deep, and true, but what about the times when the adult is trying
to weed the garden, cook the dinner and tend to the sibling, all in
the few hours left from the day job?
I’m sure you’re a great Mom.
Lovingly, gramma Ien
I knew I’d love having your input here, Ien!
I think I’d say that there’s no rule about how many of the gifts you’re offered that you have to accept. The important thing is to see them as gifts, and to realize what you may be giving up if you miss them.
Our priorities as parents can get so easily skewed by the daily run-around…I think we need to remember that it’s for our own good, not just our children’s, that we’re attentive to them. That isn’t to say you’ll never say, “In a minute, honey”. It’s to keep the correct importance of things in mind with which to make those critical little daily decisions.
Or, like I said, it’s a comment on how preachy being a parent makes me. ;)