To be a good listener, all of you – your mind as well as your body – has to be there. Mothers suffer terribly from what I like to call “crowded brain syndrome.” When your brain is crowded, there isn’t room for anything else in there. 

To listen, put aside other thoughts. Concentrate on the speaker. Don’t worry about your to-do list. It won’t ever go away. Only then can you listen to what your kids are saying, understand what you are hearing, and acknowledge their feelings.

Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who really wasn’t interested in what you had to say? How did that make you feel? Have you ever found yourself just waiting for your turn to speak without really paying attention to what is being said to you? I think we all do this a lot to our children. They may be speaking but we are waiting to tell them something. And yet we ask, “Will you listen to me?”

* We discipline them.

* We instruct them.

* We correct and direct them – even criticize them.

* We do all or most of the talking so much of the time.

Here’s an exercise for parents who want to become better listeners:

Put your mind in the same place as your body.

Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps which is heard on NPR, said it so well in this week's Sunday New York Times:  The act of listening "reminds people that they matter." So very important for children growing up! And I want to pass along a wonderful thought from Mark Nepo's new book, Seven Thousand Ways To Listen (Simon and Schuster): "Intuition is the very personal way we listen to the universe in order to discover and rediscover the learnings we were born with. As such, intuition is a deep form of listening that, when trusted, can return us to the common, irrepressible element at the center of all life..." So next time you are with your child or children, listen, listen, listen.