Excellent Parents Pay Attention

SeThe key to managing all our relationships is to pay attention appropriately. This applies more so for a parent-child relationship because the child learns to pay attention to his world and makes up his worldview from how the parents (and primarily the mother) pay attention to what is around them.

The best way to pay attention is to use your five senses optimally. For instance:

Sight: In our workshops, we help participants to distinguish between the predatory mode of seeing and the receptive / peripheral mode of seeing.

The predatory mode of seeing can be understood by the way a lion charges towards his prey after targeting it for a while. The predatory mode of seeing is fixed, aggressive and focused on one or few issues only.

The Receptive mode however is like the way a deer sees the world. Since the deer’s eyes are on either side of its face, it has a broader horizon to look at. This helps the deer to absorb into its view any suspect activity from a bigger range of vision. The receptive vision allows sight in. The receptive way of seeing is broad, gentle and quick to grasp changes outside the average range of vision.

It is extremely important for parents to view situations from a broader perspective. A fixed, aggressive and focused way of sizing a situation will nearly always end up in conflict.

And then, are you looking at your child as he speaks to you? Or are you busy watching TV, messaging on the phone, listening to music or doing something that demands your attention then? If you cannot avoid doing these when your child wants attention, the least you could do is to look him in the eye and tell him that you will be with him when you’re done and then abide by it.

However, you will be surprised by the positive change in your child when you stop doing what you are doing and give him your fullest. The child will understand that you are giving him significance and respond likewise.

Hearing: Use your sense of hearing to give more significance to your children. You can do so by:

1-      Silencing the Inner Dialogue – See our earlier article ‘Being Present’ for the full exercise. 

2-      Listening without Judgment – Sometimes our internal dialogue keeps interrupting our sense of hearing. Don’t focus on your teenager’s weird hairdo and nail fashion as you are being spoken to. Listen instead to what is being said. 

3-      Listening without Interruption – Do away with external interruptions too. You can’t teach crucial life skills to your kid with music blaring in the background.

4-      Feeling Love as you Listen – even if you are annoyed or angry, it will be useful to feel love towards your child as you deal with a grave situation. Notice the beautiful eyes, the gestures made while speaking. It will help you be calmer and even look at the situation in a funny way rather than you confronting the situation aggressively and initiating or mounting a conflict.  

Touch: It’s amazing how infants can discern easily between a loving touch and an angry, sullen touch. It is not coincidence then that infants go ballistic around irritated mothers.

Conversely, it’s intriguing how easily you can engage a young child simply by using affectionate touch. Research says that if a mother cuddles, hugs and touches her babies in an affirming way, it helps the child’s confidence, calmness and brain development.

Your children need your affectionate touch no matter how old they are. For a self-conscious teenager, an affectionate overture might be embarrassing, however try making a connection by giving an occasional head and shoulders massage.

Once you begin using your senses optimally and cut down the internal dialogue you will feel more present, relaxed and powerful than you normally are. That’s a good vantage point for a parent whatever the age of the child.