I was working with 2 4th grade girls recently who were having peer problems. One girl claims that the other girl does not want to be friends with her anymore because she’s now also friends with a “despised girl”. I tried my usual routine of giving them equal air time to tell their stories first. And they did their usual too: Stories getting more convoluted as time went by and involving more and more names. I started getting impatient as I had another appointment and found myself thinking “O come on girls, why do you have to be so petty? All this will pass…”. So I suggested that since I am not the peer mediator here that they talk to their teachers or the adults in the yard when these things happen But both of them said (almost in unison) that the adults don’t help, they don’t listen. And then one of them started crying inconsolably and before I knew it, the other one was doing the same thing. Only then did I realize that I was doing the same thing that the other adults they were complaining about. Here am I, one more adult not making the time to really listen. I was dismissing them and diminishing their experience and have forgotten that at that age, the emotions or feelings are more intense than how an adult experiences them – no matter what the story is. This is mostly due to biology – cerebral cortex not quite fully developed yet and they don’t have the sophisticated language and processing ability to articulate and analyze their feelings. So at times children are just a ball of emotions.
Some of these kids and their cohorts visit me several times a week sometimes and give me the “She said, she said…” and it’s so easy to (at least in my head) trivialize them. And since there is always more things to do than there is time in the day, I tend to rush the dialogue to a resolution so I can get to my next task (Mostly just busy work – not necessarily meaningful work. Nevertheless, they need to be done!), forgetting that sometimes all they want is to be listened to… they are not ready for the reframe yet. (Am losing my Venus-ian roots and becoming more Mars-y!).
Sometimes I question: Why can’t their parents listen to their stories so that when they get to school, they’ve been discharged and ready to learn? Are these kids who don’t get listened to become the non-stop talkers someday? Or do they become the withdrawn ones (No one cares anyway, so why even bother?)?
There are just too many stories these students want to tell, too few available listeners. Understandably – real listening is exhausting. You have to track the story and watch body language and get cues from voice tone and facial expressions. And since children are not adept at really expressing themselves quite yet, you have to interpret all of that and come up with a possible narrative as to what they are really saying.
Help! We need more listeners here!