He can hear me, why doesn’t he listen

If you have a Little Kid, you’ve asked yourself this question: “I know he can hear me, why won’t he LISTEN?!” 

It can be really tempting to think that the reason kids aren’t listening is because they’re deliberately disobeying and being willful, obstinate and otherwise recalcitrant.

And sometimes they are.

But:

One thing we know about little kids in general -- especially those with speech and language delays -- is that sometimes their brains are having trouble interpreting incoming stimuli. We also know that sometimes their brains are having trouble acting on what they are interpreting. So, while they may be able to hear perfectly clearly, they might have a hard time listening (making sense of what they hear), and they might have a hard time demonstrating that they are listening.

Huh?

Here’s how it works (simplified version!)

When we hear a sound, our brains perceive the sound in one part of the brain. This is the hearing part of the program. Sound waves come in through our ears, moves the eardrums and the tiny little bones in there (!), triggering movement of fluid in the cochlea (inner ear), creating an electrical impulse that travels up the auditory nerve to the brain.

Phew! 

But it’s only begun, because that’s literally just the hearing part of the equation.

The next (much more complicated) step is to make meaning out of that sound (this is the listening part).

The Listening part involves other, more diffuse areas of the brain that are designed to:

1. Filter noises and decide what (and what not) to pay attention to.

What if you paid attention equally to all sounds that your ears could hear: the fan, the fridge motor, the siren outside your window, the cars rushing by on the street, the sound of the birds in the trees… oh, and by the way your spouse asking you to take the lasagna out of the oven?

You would be completely incapacitated. You would be frozen in a constant attempt to figure out what to pay attention to or not pay attention to.

But somehow your brain learns what to focus on and what to put in the background.

1. Retrieve meaning from Storage based on past experiences

The reason we know what people are talking about is because we understand the words they say. But how did that happen in the first place? Most of that is a question for another day, but here’s the short answer. We understand what people say because we learned that words have meaning and our brains stored that meaning AND because we can retrieve that meaning when we encounter that word (or set of words).

1. Formulate an appropriate response based on the incoming message.

This might be spurring your body into action to demonstrate that you heard your spouse when they asked you to take the food out of the oven.

This might be answering the question that someone asked you in a meeting.

This might be listening to the siren for a second before realizing that it’s going away from you (and no action is required) OR that it’s coming toward you (and you’d better pull over to the side of the road).

Our adult brains know how to do all this so seamlessly most of the time, that it can appear as if no effort is involved. As if no learning was involved.

Au contraire.

All you have to do is look at your Little One to know that everything I just talked about except the ‘sound entering the brain’ part is a LEARNED RESPONSE.

Most brains learn these things easily. Almost automatically. 

But some don’t.

Some brains have trouble filtering out irrelevant sounds in the environment, leading some bodies to FREAK OUT every time they hear the doorbell ring.

Some brains have trouble formulating a physical response to words that someone says to them, leading them to NOT get their shoes even though you’ve asked them 100 times to do it.

Some brains have trouble storing or retrieving (or both) words and word meanings, which means that -- although they can hear what you say -- they don’t understand.

Learning to listen -- and not just hear -- is a process. Most of the time, it goes really well. It looks effortless. It looks easy. 

But when we’ve got a kiddo who is having trouble with any part of what it takes to listen and understand, we realize just how complicated Listening can be.

If your little one is having trouble with listening. If you are feeling like you talk and talk and talk but they’re not listening, it’s worth asking why. Get a speech and language therapist on it sooner rather than later. You’ll be glad you did.