Names and identifying details of every student below have been changed.
Timofey, nine, in the Nashville suburbs, interrupts every conversation in the house and cannot tell you what anybody said. His parents call it one problem. His details are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
Two problems, one complaint
There are two problems here, and they pull in opposite directions. Interrupting means the child heard you, understood you, had a thought, and could not hold it while you finished. That is a braking problem. Inhibition is one of three core abilities a child is building, and the whole apparatus is still under construction into their twenties.
Telling a child to wait fixes one of these and is irrelevant to the other.
Not listening is often the opposite. The words went past. Nothing caught. There was no thought to hold back, which is why the usual remedy for interrupting does nothing here.The year I had it backwards
I spent a long time treating both problems as one, and I taught the wrong thing to a boy who deserved better. He was twelve, talked over everybody, and I spent a semester on turn-taking with him. Signals, pauses, the whole apparatus. He got good at it. He still could not tell me what the previous speaker had said, and every hour on signals went to the half of the problem he did not have. Then I asked him to repeat somebody’s sentence, and watched. Not defiance. Not indifference. The particular blankness of somebody handed a question about a thing they were never holding in the first place, a face I now recognize across a room.A child can wait beautifully and hear nothing.
The thing nobody practices
Try this once today. Have a conversation in which you do not plan your reply while the other person is still talking. Much harder than it sounds. I catch myself assembling responses during a student’s second sentence, which means I hear the rest at half strength, and I do this for a living.Holding your own thought in reserve while still taking in somebody else’s.
My own mother had a word for this in me, nevospitanny, badly raised. She was right about the behavior and wrong about what it meant. That is the actual skill under listening, and it is not silence, which children produce on demand for as long as anybody asks, without a word landing.When they interrupt during an argument
This is the version parents find hardest, and it has a mechanical fix. Ask each person to say the other’s point before making their own. Not agree with it. Say it back accurately enough that the other person nods. Slow, artificial, effective. A child who knows they will have to repeat your sentence has a reason to hold on to it, and the reason arrives before the sentence does, not after you have lost your temper. You are not asking them to be patient. You are giving the listening a job.
Timofey still interrupts, but he now says hold on, I’ve got something first. Not listening, but an improvement, and he can usually repeat what his mother just said.What to do instead of asking for quiet
| Instead of | Try |
|---|---|
| Don’t interrupt | Hold it. I want to hear it in a minute |
| Are you listening? | Tell me the last thing I said |
| Let her finish | Whose turn is it? |
| Pay attention | I’ll wait until you’re ready |
Frequently asked questions
Usually because the thought arrives and cannot be held. That is inhibition, one of the executive functions still developing well past childhood, and it improves slowly with practice rather than quickly with reminders.
Give the listening a purpose. Tell me the last thing I said asks for something specific; are you listening asks for a performance of attention.
Quiet is not listening. If the words are going past without catching, shorten what you say, ask for it back, and check whether the room is too loud for anybody to have heard.
Sources
- Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. (May 20, 2012). InBrief: Executive Function. developingchild.harvard.edu
- Diamond, A. (2013). Executive Functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168. doi.org
Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials for parents
Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.
