Listening for Your 1-Year-Old

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play an essential role in your child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship while building essential listening skills in your child.

Your child’s healthy development depends upon their growing ability to listen and understand what you and others are communicating. Listening skills can support your child’s ability to engage in healthy relationships, focus, and learn. For example, children need to successfully communicate with you and understand what you are saying to them for their very survival. They are busy learning words, so your conversations support their language and brain development.

Now that they are moving and exploring, they must listen to your instructions to stay safe. As in infancy, each time you are responsive to your child’s cries and needs, showing them love and care, they feel understood and learn about the two-way nature of communication.

Through their interactions with you and other caregivers, one-year-olds come to better understand themselves. They are learning their strengths and limitations, why they feel the way they do, and how they relate to others. Parents and those in a parenting role share in this learning and exploration. This is a critical time to teach and practice listening skills.

Yet, we all face challenges when it comes to listening. With screens, including mobile devices, engaging adults for hours of our day, opportunities to interact eye-to-eye with your child and exercise listening skills may be missed. Listening skills require other important skills like impulse control, focused attention, empathy, and nonverbal and verbal communication.

For parents or those in a parenting role, the key to many challenges, like building essential listening skills, is finding ways to communicate to meet your and your child’s needs. The steps below include specific and practical strategies to prepare you for growing this vital skill.

Why Listening?

Children learn about themselves and how they relate to others through sensitive, caring interactions with you. These interactions impact their ability to listen, communicate effectively, learn about and manage their feelings, and trust in you as a caregiver. They are becoming more mobile, and soon, you’ll be faced with a fast-moving child who needs to follow your instructions to stay safe in your home. Your focus on listening and communicating with your child will lay a critical foundation for trusting interactions.

Today, in the short term, teaching skills to listen can create

• greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment
• trust in each other that you have the competence to manage your relationships and responsibilities
• a sense of well-being and motivation to engage

Tomorrow, in the long term, working on effective listening skills with your child

• develops a sense of safety, security, and a belief in self
• builds skills in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships, and responsible decision-making
• deepens family trust and intimacy

Five Steps for Building Listening Skills

This five-step process helps you and your child cultivate effective listening skills, a critical life skill. The same process can also address other parenting issues (learn more about it).

One-year-olds are starting to verbalize their needs by babbling, crying, and starting to use single words. Despite your child’s emerging ability to use words, continue to pay close attention to their facial expressions, movements, and sounds to work on understanding what they are trying to communicate. Your effort to learn from your child will create empathetic interactions that promote healthy listening skills in you and your child. In becoming sensitive to the nuances of your child’s verbal and nonverbal expressions, you

• are responding to their needs
• are growing their trust in you, sense of safety, and sense of healthy relationships
• are growing motivation for you and your child to work together
• are improving your ability to communicate with one another
• are growing your own and their self-control (to calm down when upset and focus their attention)
• are modeling empathy and problem-solving skills

Actions

• Each time there is an opportunity, ask your child, “How do you feel? How do you think I feel?”  One-year-olds do not yet have a feelings vocabulary and cannot describe their body sensations when they are upset or dealing with big feelings. They will need your support to be successful.
  • For example, if your child is making a disagreeable facial expression, say, “Freeze,” like a game. Pull out the mirror, ask them to repeat the face, and ask what that facial expression represents. For example, “Your eyebrows are squished down, and there’s a line in your forehead. Are you feeling mad?”
• When reading books, look at the images of children or animals and guess the feelings by asking, “What do you think this character is feeling?”
• If your child is unsure about how others are feeling or buried in their own feelings, help them by sharing what you think others are feeling. You could say, “I wonder if that person is feeling sad because their head is hanging down and their mouth is frowning. Do you think they feel sad?” Or, “I think that person might be feeling angry because their face is red and their eyebrows are scrunched up. Do you think they feel angry?”
• Practicing naming emotions will enable your child to identify their feelings and others and seek support when needed. This can help reduce the length and strength of tantrums as your child gains emotional competence.

Children are learning how to engage in healthy relationships through loving interactions, including listening effectively. Skill building takes intentional practice. Learning about developmental milestones can help you to better understand what your child is working hard to learn. Here are some examples:¹

• 12-18-month-olds will respond to their name and may use 5 to 10 words. They are starting to combine words with gestures, follow simple directions, and remember recent events and actions. They may feel uneasy when separated from their loved ones
• 18-24-month-olds can understand ten times more than they can speak, are starting to respond to questions, point to familiar objects and people in pictures, and follow two-step directions. They are also starting to want to try things on their own.

Teaching is different than just telling. Teaching builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your child for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems.

Actions

• Model listening while interacting with your child. Modeling listening skills can be one of the greatest teaching tools.
  • Share the focus. As you spend time with your child, follow their lead. As they pick up new toys or explore a different part of the room, they move, notice, and name what they are exploring.²
  • Notice gestures and listen for thoughts and feelings. Attempt to figure out what your child is trying to tell you through their sounds, gestures, and facial expressions. When they are expressing a feeling on their face or through their body, name it. “I noticed your face is red, and your shoulders are tense. You look angry.”
  • Children require your attention to thrive. So, why not build a special time into your routine when you are fully present to listen to what your child has to tell you? Turn off your phone. Set a timer if needed. Then, notice your body language. Ask yourself, “What is my body communicating, and how am I demonstrating that I’m listening?”
• Talk to your child. Research confirms that talking to a child enhances their language development.³
• Talk clearly and slowly. Exaggerate your words for clarity and understanding. Don’t use “baby talk,” which can be difficult to understand.
• Label what you see. “I see a duck. What does a duck say?”
• Narrate your feelings. As you are going through your bedtime routine, talk about what you are doing each step of the way. Involve your child by asking questions. For example, you might say, “I just yawned and am feeling sleepy. Do you think I should take a nap?”
• Narrate your daily routines. As you prepare breakfast at home or go shopping together at the store, talk about what you are doing each step of the way. Involve your child by asking questions. For example, “I am getting out your favorite cereal bowl. I think we’ll have some cereal this morning. Does that sound yummy to you?”

If you seize the opportunity, your daily conversations can be opportunities for your child to practice new vital skills. Each time your child works hard to practice essential listening skills, they grow vital new brain connections that strengthen and eventually form habits.

Practice also provides important opportunities to grow self-efficacy—a child’s sense that they can do a task or skill successfully. This leads to confidence. It will also help them understand that mistakes are part of learning.

Actions

• Initially, your child may need active support to encourage listening skills. Engage in listening activities together, like listening to a simple audio book or a song, and then reflect on what you heard together. “I heard clapping.”
• Recognize effort by using “I notice…” statements like, “I noticed how you listened to my direction to stay away from the stairs. That will keep you safe.”
• Making animal sounds can be a fun, engaging game for you and your child as they attempt to match what they hear with their own growing ability to make sounds.

• There are several games and songs that require strong listening skills. Offer practice by playing these games with your child. For example, making music requires listening particularly if you introduce it as a game. “Let’s dance or play along with our instruments.” Playing along helps a child attune their beats and tones with the sounds they are hearing. Household pots, pans, and spoons can be ideal experiment instruments.
• Read or chant rhymes or poetry to your child — particularly ones with repetitive words and sounds.
• Read together. When you read stories together, you engage in a listening activity that can be deeply connecting for both of you. Reflect on the story, and you’ll take the learning opportunity one step further. “Do you think Little Red Riding Hood was excited to go to Grandma’s house?” Involve your child in selecting the book, holding it, and turning the pages to build ownership and interest in reading.

At this point, you are developing your child’s listening skills and allowing them to practice. Now, you can offer support when needed by reteaching, monitoring, and coaching. Parents and those in a parenting role naturally offer support when they see their child fumble with a situation in which they need help. This is no different.

By providing support, you are reinforcing their ability to succeed and helping them improve their listening skills.

Actions

• Learn about your child’s development. Each new age presents different challenges. Being informed about your child’s developmental milestones offers you empathy and patience.
• Stay engaged. Trying new listening strategies can offer additional support and motivation for your child, especially when communication becomes challenging.

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your child is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your child’s confidence. Your recognition also promotes safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your child’s efforts. It is essential to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your child’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your child. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is key to promoting more of it. For example, ““I notice you listened when I asked you to back away from the stove. I know you’re curious, and I am glad you are keeping safe.”  Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment such as a smile, high five, or hug.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the child knows what to expect, like “If you behave in the store, you will get a treat on the drive home.” (If you XX, then I’ll XX.) It stops any negotiations in the heat of the moment.  A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your child progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease a child’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis (like in the grocery store checkout line and a child is having a tantrum. To avoid disaster, a parent offers to buy a sucker if the child will stop the tantrum). While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions

• Recognize and call out when things are going well. It may seem obvious, but it’s easy not to notice when everything is moving along smoothly. Noticing and naming the behavior provides the necessary reinforcement that you see and value your child’s choice.
• Recognize small steps along the way. Don’t wait for significant accomplishments—like the full bedtime routine going smoothly—to recognize effort. Remember that your recognition can work as a tool to promote more positive behaviors. Find small ways your child is making an effort and let them know you see them.
• Build celebrations into your routine. For example, after getting through your bedtime routine, snuggle and read before bed. Or, in the morning, once ready for school, take a few minutes to listen to music together.

Closing

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that will strengthen your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role on many other issues and develop essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Through this tool, children can become more self-aware, deepen their social awareness, exercise their self-management skills, work on their relationship skills, and demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making.