What Are The Benefits of Active Listening?

The Benefits of Active Listening to Children

Feelings get dissipated

Troublesome, negative feelings are more apt to go away when they are expressed and accepted.

Feelings become friendly

If a parent accepts a child's feelings with Active Listening, it helps the child accept them and not feel they're "bad."

Produces a deeper feeling of caring

Being heard and understood by their parent makes children develop warm feelings toward the parent.

Children will start listening to the parent

If parents take the time to hear out their children, then children will be more apt to want to listen to the parent.

Children will become more responsible

Talking out a problem helps them think it through, discover their own solutions and become more self-responsible.

Parents will learn to trust their children

As the child begins to solve his/her problem, the parent will gain more trust in the child's capacity to handle problems.

Parents will become more accepting

Watching children deal constructively with their feelings, parents will become more accepting, too.

Parents will enjoy being a new kind of helper

Parents will find they won't have to shoulder the burden of finding solutions for their child's problems.

Parents will see children as separate persons

The child will become a separate person--with his/her own feelings, own problems, own solutions--no longer "joined at the hip" with the parent.

The parent won't have to be a "super-parent"

Parents will feel relieved not having to solve all their children's problems, be in charge, always be right, be totally responsible and even assume all the blame for their failures.*

*Excerpt from Dr. Thomas Gordon's F.E.T. Adult Resource Book