Listening for Your 2-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 must successfully communicate with you and understand what you are saying to them for their survival. They are busy learning words, so your conversations support their language and brain development.

Now that they are moving and exploring, they need to 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. In the future, children must listen to their teacher if they are to follow directions and successfully navigate expectations at school. Not surprisingly, better listening skills are associated with school success.

Through their interactions with you and other caregivers, two-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 using 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. Now that your child is highly mobile, they need to be able to follow your instructions to stay safe in your home and your neighborhood. 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 language and literacy competence
• 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 be used to address other parenting issues as well (learn more about the process).

Two-year-olds are highly active, exploring their environment and everything in it. They add new words to their vocabulary regularly but do not yet know how to name their big feelings. Frustrations with not being understood may result in them losing control more frequently. Despite your child’s new 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 deepening 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

Consider how your child reacts when upset, angry, or frustrated. How do they show you? Children at this age may cry, yell, hit, bite, grab, kick, hide, or pout. Their upset may last longer than an older child’s because they have not yet learned how to understand their feelings and deal with them in healthy ways. Check out some ways you can respond to your upset child that promote emotional competence.

• If a child cries, offer comfort items like a favorite teddy bear or a blanket. Do not attempt to talk anything through when a child is distraught. Focus on calming down first.
• If a child hits or bites in anger or frustration, stop and say, “Ouch. That hurts my arm, and it hurts my feelings.” Then, be sure to reflect on the anger. “You are angry. What can you do that is safe and doesn’t hurt others when angry? Would squeezing your pillow help?” Practice some simple ideas like hugging a pillow or walking outside together. 2-year-olds are just starting to develop a feelings vocabulary and cannot describe their body sensations when they are upset or dealing with big feelings.
• Name the feeling each time your child is upset or expresses any big feeling and ask if you are correct. “You seem angry. Is that right?” This builds their feelings vocabulary, increasing their self-awareness and ability to manage them.

As you react to your child in ways that soothe, you will find they feel a greater sense of your understanding and responsiveness so that your interactions become two-way instead of one-way, even when they are distraught.

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

• two-year-olds are expanding their vocabulary rapidly and will be able to say 200-250 words by age three.
• two-year-olds will be eager to engage in imaginative play and, at times, cooperative play with other children. Through play, children gain vital practice with all of their developmental milestones.
• two-years-olds are highly active with short attention spans.
• two-years-olds are developing the ability to run, jump, and climb and are eager to engage in gross motor skills (large movements).

Teaching is different from just telling. It builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and sets your child up for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems. It is also an opportunity to establish meaningful, logical consequences for when expectations are not met.

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. Improve your nonverbal skill interpretation and determine what your child tries to tell you through their sounds, gestures, and facial expressions. When expressing a feeling on their face or through their body, name it and ask them if it’s true. “I noticed your face is red, and your shoulders are tense. You look worried. Are you feeling worried?”
  • Help your child understand other people’s feelings by asking them how they think others feel in certain circumstances. You could say, “I just bumped my elbow. How do you think I feel right now?” Or, when reading a story or in pretend play, you could ask, “How do you think the little bear feels right now?”
  • 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. Give it a special name you and your child create, like “Mom and Susie’s Special Time.” Then, notice your body language. Ask yourself: “What is my body communicating, and how am I demonstrating that I’m listening?”
• Create a safe base. In a time when your child is not upset, talk about what makes your child feel better and offers comfort. Create a “safe base” with your child — a place in the house where your child can choose to go when they want comfort. Place a pillow, blanket, and stuffed animal there. Play act using it. “I am getting red in the face. I’m hot. I feel angry. I’m going to my safe base to calm down.” 
• 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.”

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 new vital 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 and failures 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 audiobook or a song, and then reflect on what you heard together. “I heard a drum.”
• Recognize effort by using “I notice…” statements like, “I noticed how you listened to my direction to stay on the driveway. That keeps you safe.” 
• Several games and songs require strong listening skills. Offer practice by playing these games with your child.
  • Hide and Seek is a favorite child game. In it, the child tries to figure out where you’ve hidden or where they hide from you. This also exercises turn-taking skills, which are essential to communication.
  • Music Making. Music requires listening, mainly if you introduce it as a game. “Let’s dance or play along with our instruments.” Playing along helps children attune their beats and tones to their hearing sounds. Household pots, pans, and spoons can be ideal experiment instruments.
• Read together. When you read stories together, you engage in a listening activity that can be deeply connecting for both of you. Be sure to involve your child in selecting the book they want to read. Involve your child in holding the book, turning pages, and predicting what will come next. Hold onto a page before turning it and ask, “What do you think will happen next?” 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?”
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  Step 4 Support Your Child’s Development and Success

  
  At this point, you have been developing your child’s listening skills and allowing them to practice. Now, you can offer support when it’s needed by reteaching, monitoring, coaching, and, when appropriate, applying logical consequences. Parents and those in a parenting role naturally offer support as 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. Working together on ideas for trying out new and different listening strategies can offer additional support and motivation for your child, especially when communication becomes challenging.
  • Engage in further practice. Play listening games to reinforce skills, such as “Let’s see if you can name all the sounds we hear when we go outside!” Create more opportunities to practice when all is calm.
  Trap: When your child does not listen to you or focuses elsewhere, you might be tempted to scold or nag, but give them additional chances. We all lose our focus sometimes. Get down on their level, eye to eye, and review what you said again to help them refocus their attention. End with a smile or hug to reinforce your connection.
  

  Step 5 Recognize Efforts

  
  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, “You listened to my directions to keep you 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.

  Trap: It can be easy to resort to bribes when recognition and occasional rewards are underutilized. If parents or those in a parenting role frequently resort to bribes, it is likely time to revisit the five-step process. 
  
  
  Trap: Think about what behavior a bribe may unintentionally reinforce. For example, offering a sucker if a child stops a tantrum in the grocery store checkout line may teach the child that future tantrums lead to additional treats.

  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.