Don’t Interrupt Your Kids

Nor Anyone Else

Learning to express ideas with words is challenging. One must practice for years to achieve a mediocre level of self-expression. For a child, the exercise of mentally holding ideas in their minds and cohesively organizing words can be extremely difficult if they are not properly encouraged, and it’s close to impossible if they are not allowed to reach the logical conclusion of what they are trying to communicate.

Ideas are like a ball of wool. They need to be first unraveled if we intend in making something out of it.

Imagine that you are carefully working on unraveling your ball of wool and suddenly someone comes and cuts the thread mid-way. Not only the progress unraveling the ball is gone, but the entire ball of wool is ruined!

This idea is extremely important in infant education and can also be applied to human beings of all ages. When was the last time that you listened to what a colleague from work had to say until they reached the logical conclusion of what they had in mind, without interrupting them?

With kids, I found that an effective way to put this into practice is to sit down next to them when they are engaged in some rhythm and repetitive activity — such as video games — and simply listen. Hear every word of what they have to say carefully waiting until they finish what they have to say. Only interrupt with you can see how to make the conversation more meaningful.

The logical conclusion will be reached after they have unraveled the metaphorical ball of wool. This means that they will probably say many things that they don’t believe to be true before they eventually correct themselves. If you interrupt them, this work will be lost.

Saying untrue things is not wrong. The mistake is not letting the kid correct themselves.

For adults, there’s another trick. The key is to listen and explore the idea together.

Attentively listen to what they have to say and only interrupt if you wish to make a question that will make the conversation richer. This means that if they are telling a story you should interrupt any time you feel that there’s a point of the story that the interlocutor can explore more.

Sorry to interrupt, but can you talk more about this…

Wait, can you describe the place this story took place?

The Impulse of Interrupting

To succeed in letting the interlocutor reach the logical end of their ideas one must contain oneself every time the impulse of interrupting the other arises.

This is imperative to a good conversation because — as I mentioned before — an interruption can wreck communication and will debilitate that person’s ability to accurately explore the subject.

The best way to hold back this impulse is to be conscious.

There’s no other way, actually.

With the presence of spirit and consciousness, it’s possible to identify the impulse of interrupting the other as it surfaces and then we can let it exist without expressing it.

Let the impulse come, and then let it go.

The Results

The overall quality of your interactions with co-workers, family members, friends, kids, etc… will increase drastically if you stop the impulse of interrupting them mid-story.

For children, this is especially effective because a kid must learn verbal self-expression by doing. They must speak to other people because when we talk to someone else we are not allowed to take mental shortcuts. This means that to successfully communicate an idea — any idea — one must logically structure the idea, organizing words comprehensively. This rarely happens when we work on an idea alone, without talking to somebody else.

If you want to understand any subject just try and explain it to someone else.

Stop interrupting your kids, they want to talk and they must be heard.

Don’t ever think that you are making them a favor by interrupting them mid-sentence and “correcting” them. Let them reach the correct logical conclusion by having a conversation with you.

Your job as a parent or educator is to serve as a context for an exercise that is fundamental to make them able to externalize the internal world of ideas.

My motivation to write this story is the many times that I was asked a question or an opinion about some subject and I was interrupted before I could even start to answer.

I can later articulate the ideas in my mind or simply write it down — which helps tremendously — but what hurts me is that the person has lost an opportunity to know me.

If I’m talking with someone important in my life — like my parents — I’m interested that they get to know who I am and this necessarily includes that they understand what I think and what I believe, and they will never get there if they keep interrupting me.

I don’t take this badly, of course, I can recognize that they are used to letting the impulse of running my ideas over with their own words, but I know that in the long run, we will grow further apart until the bridge between us gets stretched too thin. Maybe too thin be ever crossed again.

So please take this seriously and stop interrupting your kids.