Listening to Children Crying

by Patty Wiper

Listening to Children

Crying
When Your Child Begins to Cry
In listening to parents over the years, I have learned a simple truth: parents want good lives for their children. We want our young ones to be happy, loved, respected and understood. We also want the chance to correct the mistakes our parents made with us. For most of us, these goals are far more difficult to achieve than we had imagined.
We discover that loving and nourishing a child is complex work that challenges the hardiest grownup. Help is scarce as we juggle too much work, too little time, and the constant call of our children to “Come and play, Daddy!” and “Watch this, Mommy!”
It’s no wonder, then, we become troubled when our children start to cry. To us, their crying often feels like parental failure. The scene is familiar: we are shuffling through the day in reasonably good spirits, balancing the children’s needs, our needs and that long mental list of things to be done. One of the children wants a cracker. When the box turns up empty he begins to cry. At this moment, our insides curdle. We become annoyed, worried, tired, exasperated.
We try to stop him from crying. Our tactics might be to soothe him, to try to talk him into a cracker substitute, to point out his mistake in wanting crackers before dinner, or to scold him when he doesn’t stop crying over something so silly. We want the crying to stop so the hurt will go away.
If we watch closely, though, we may notice that the hurt doesn’t always go away when the crying stops. A child may quiet down, but often he’ll still feel upset. He will droop and refuse to look at anyone. Or he might become angry toward the people he loves.
An incident that begins with tears about a small thing, perhaps a broken truck or a torn homework paper, can turn into a long period
of