The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols Read Free Book Online Page B

baby may probe the par-
    ent’s mouth or nose with a finger or tug at a strand of hair to see if it will
    come loose. The parent who takes this exploration as an act of aggression
    may get annoyed and attribute hostility to the baby. If so, the parent may
    follow up this feeling with a rebuke, a slap, or some rejection of the baby,
    who had only been doing what comes naturally at this age.
    The misunderstood baby is confused by the parent’s lack of under-
    standing, upset and frightened by the rebuke. Maybe it was a mistake , the
    baby thinks. Then, if the baby repeats the exploration, to clarify the confu-
    sion or to evoke a different response this time, the baby may now do so with
    a more energetic assertiveness. Now the parent will assume that his or her
    original misunderstanding was confirmed: the baby is being aggressive.

    How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other 35
    If this situation is repeated, the parent’s false interpretation may
    become the infant’s (and later the child’s) official and accepted one: explo-
    ration is aggression, and it’s bad. The baby may come to see himself as
    aggressive, even hostile. Someone else’s reality has become his. Misunder-
    standing undermines not only our trust in others, but also our trust in our
    own perceptions.
    The word for sharing experience is intersubjectivity. The reason for this
    fancy term where an ordinary word like communication might do is to keep
    us from forgetting that understanding is a joint achievement: one person
    trying to express what’s on his or her mind, the other trying to read it.
    Reading a child’s mind begins with attunement.
    Attunement, a parent’s ability to share the child’s affective state, is a
    pervasive feature of parent–child interactions with profound consequences.
    It’s the forerunner of empathy and the essence of human understanding.
    Attunement begins with the intuitive parental response of sharing the
    baby’s mood and showing it. The baby reaches out excitedly and grabs
    a toy. When the toy is in her grasp, she lets out an exuberant “aah!” and
    looks at her mother. Mother responds in kind, sharing the baby’s exhilara-
    tion and showing it by smiling and nodding and saying “Yes!” The mother
    has understood and shared the child’s mood. That’s attunement.
    One demonstration of the baby’s need for an attuned response is the
    still-face procedure. If a mother (or father) goes still-faced— impassive and
    expressionless—in the middle of an interaction, the baby will become
    upset and withdraw. Infants after about two-and-a-half months of age react
    strongly to this still face. They look about. Their smile dies away and they
    frown. They make repeated attempts to reignite the mother by smiling
    and gesturing and calling her. If they don’t succeed, they finally turn away,
    looking unhappy and confused.8 It hurts to reach out to someone who
    doesn’t respond.
    “No, I Don’t Want a Nap! I Want to Play.”:
    The Sense of a Verbal Self (Fifteen to Eighteen Months)
    Learning to speak creates a new type of connection between parent and
    child. The acquisition of language has traditionally been seen as a major
    step in the achievement of a separate identity, next only to locomotion.
    8Daniel Stern, Diary of a Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
    36 THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD
    But the opposite is also true: the acquisition of language is a potent force
    for interaction and intimacy.
    Developmental psychologists Arnold Sameroff and Robert Emde sum-
    marize an extensive literature that shows that emotional unresponsiveness
    produces an infant with “a restricted range of emotional expressiveness;
    less clear signaling; and a predominance of disengagement, distress, or
    avoidance in interactions. Under these conditions, clinicians may also see
    a ‘turning off’ of affective interactions and, in extreme cases, sustained
    sadness or depression.”9 In other words, a child whose