My child doesn't listen well and forgets most of what I say.

Do you sometimes feel like everything you say to your child goes, “in one ear and out of the other” or that if you ask them to do something, they forget most of it? You are not alone.

Here, in PART 1, we discuss some of the things to consider when this happens. Even better, consider them at a different time altogether if you can, so you can have a proper think about it and maybe even make a plan!

Let’s unpack some of the things that are going on when you tell your child something or ask them to do something.

1. Hearing all the sounds in your voice

2. Processing the sounds into words

3. Processing the words into meanings

4. Remembering the meanings

5. “Acting” on what has been said

These are often interlinked and the edges blur but, for the sake of creating a straightforward picture, we can use these ideas as a starter.

1. Hearing all the sounds in your voice

Can your child actually hear you?

Medical checks

The physical ability to hear all the sounds in your voice is a very important consideration. Childhood hearing tests are excellent for detecting all sorts of issues and you should always seek medical advice if you have the slightest concern that this may be an issue.

Missing even just some parts of sound, can result in mis-hearing and lead to misunderstanding. It can also lead to speech problems.

Illness

Having a cold or ear infection can affect hearing and worth bearing in mind when observing your child.

Longer term difficulties with hearing can affect sound formation in the mouth – speech so it is worth checking out any particular observations and patterns you may notice.

Direction

You might remember from school that sound waves travel forward.
If you and your child are facing in different directions, their ears will not “catch” the sound so well. It is easy to forget how much we rely on our eyes when listening – we lipread as part of the process. It is only when that option is unavailable though, using the telephone, sight difficulties or medical masks that we realise how much more we have to really concentrate on the actual sounds.

It is worth checking your relative positions!

Weather

If your child has their hood up or a woolly hat on, (for fashion/security/coldness) their hearing will be affected.

If it is windy, this too will affect their hearing. (It is well known for causing a feeling of unsettledness too)

Background noise

Classrooms, busy roads, soft play centres, cafes, hospitals etc: all noisy places and for many children and adults alike, filtering out that noise to just the one – your voice – can be extremely difficult.

If difficulty hearing seems to be just a temporary situation,

it might be related to any of the above.

If it’s a combination of any of these, the difficulty will be multiplied!

2. Processing the sounds into words

This is an element of listening that we kind of take for granted. It’s really important to think about.

First, we need to have physically heard all the sounds – correctly, and then we have to put those sounds together into words, and then into groups of words. (We will come on to making meanings, which is inextricably linked, in section 3)

Our ability, as with our child’s ability to do this, is positively or negatively affected by a variety of things – usually linked to concentration and attention levels.

Concentrating on something else

If your child (or anyone else for that matter) is engrossed in an activity, they may physically hear you, but not register at all. They may hear you, but again, don’t really register your voice within the busyness of their brain at that time.

A physical need

If your child is hungry, tired, unwell or in pain, their ability to process sounds into words is diminished. This blurs into the category of making meaning too. If the brain is too occupied with self-preservation physically, it is already loaded up.

An emotional need

If your child is upset, stressed, worrying, frightened, masking or coping in an unusual or difficult situation, this can also affect their ability to create words and groups of words accurately, from the sounds they may, or may not be hearing accurately.

There are some health related situations such as Irlens, which cause a substantial challenge regarding filtering out which bits to process and which bits to ignore. So the brain is full of things it is trying to process all at once.

3. Processing sounds and words into meaning, and implications for action

We often hear the phrase, “in one ear and out of the other” and this is probably the most obvious place for it. Sounds are heard, possibly processed into words – or not, and certainly no reaction or action results!

Various things, including those already mentioned above, affect this stage.

Additionally we can think about the following:

Mishearing

If the sounds/words are only partially heard or misheard, understanding will be affected. The remembering of what is heard and meant is also affected. We remember things wrong!

Words we don’t know

When words we don’t know are involved in what is being listened to, obviously, the meaning is affected. Sometimes our brain simply glosses over the word, guesses or associates the word with something that they know – that might possibly make sense.

Sometimes words have more than one meaning, and we rely on the context of the situation to make the correct meaning. What if the context is missing, confusing or unfamiliar? Again, we potentially have a misunderstanding brewing.

Think about situations where our children are in unfamiliar territory such as hospital, a different relation’s home, a new classroom. Consider how this context implies a certain set of meanings to us adults, who know about these things, and how that lack of prior knowledge for the child can cause confusions regarding what words and phrases might mean.

And their remembering will be affected by this…

All of this happens in tiny fragments of time, and before we know it, we have a child who is either confused or inaccurate.

Context matters in other ways too.

For children, much of their context is about “now” and “me”. As they develop, their awareness and understanding moves outwards from themselves and their present moment. If what they are hearing is way out of this context, their ability to attach meaning to what you are saying is considerably less than if you were talking to an adult. If you are talking to them about something not directly about them, or linked to them, your words will have little meaning. If you are talking about something far into their future or past, again they will struggle to make any sense of what you are saying. If you should happen to be doing both, and talking about the distant future related to something that has no personal resonance for them, well ….. you get the point!

Too much information

Here is something else which will affect your child’s ability to make sense of the sounds you are making at them. If you simply say too much at once, or too quickly, you create a sense of overwhelm – and at that point, the brain ceases to process very much very well. We all know how that feels as adults, and it’s easy to forget that our children are still learning all of these skills. It’s important for us to step back and put ourselves in their little shoes.

4. Remembering everything

We all remember things in different ways – which is a different blog post that I haven’t written yet!

However, what is common for us all, is the way our ability to remember, and remember well, can be affected – positively and negatively.

How MUCH information is being heard
How that information is being shared (here we are specifically thinking about our sense of hearing so things like tone of voice, register of voice, and how loud or soft that voice is. Is the speaking voice very monotone or difficult to listen to? Or is it lively and varied?}
If the information is linked to anything – prior knowledge, experiences, memories, actions
All of the previous factors mentioned regarding concentration
All of the previous factors regarding the physical process of hearing and accuracy

.

5. Acting upon what you have heard

As you can see from all of this, the process of listening, remembering and acting upon what has been said is, in some ways, incredibly precarious! It’s a wonder any of our children move forward; yet move forward they do.

It is helpful to put all of this thinking together and remember that the ultimate goal, from your talk with your child, is some kind of action – be it conversational, doing a task, making a plan, thinking about something, playing a game.

There is one more thing to consider; the time lapse between what is initially heard, and any action which might happen as a result of it.

If your child hears some words from you, successfully processes them and correctly understands what you mean, the chance of them remembering the talk is improved if they take action quickly.

That might simply be a body movement, looking at a picture, writing a note or picture of their own or making a mental link with something they know. That’s why we do action songs with children, draw pictures to remember an event, link things they are learning with what they already know and crucially, help them understand the purpose, or how they might feel as a result.

As you can imagine, if the amount of information is too much, the chance of acting on all of it is very limited. That’s why we break things down into much smaller chunks. These days, those chunks are smaller than ever e.g. maths methods and feel unfamiliar to us as adults. Ultimately, by doing this, more children have more chance of not only understanding, but remembering. And for most children, this can only be a good thing.

By hearing and understanding we are only at the beginning of the journey; remembering it, takes us into a whole new territory.

In the next blog,

we will explore some tried and tested, easy methods to help with all of this.

They will help you in adult environments too, and will help you understand your children better

so that you can enjoy living and growing together.

Feel better, for longer.

My child doesn’t listen well and forgets most of what I ask them to do. Part 1