Listen With Your Eyes

One thing I have learned as a parent is this: listen with your eyes.

Our kids do not always say exactly what they are feeling. They might say they are fine, or that everything is good, while their body language is communicating something completely different, and you can usually see it before they ever explain it. You see it in how they walk into the room, in how they throw their bag down, in how they answer a question, or sometimes in how they avoid answering one.

As a former professional coach who now coaches youth sports, I am friends with a lot of coaches. And I have sat next to many of them while watching their kids play. Every once in a while I will hear one of them say just two words: “body language.” They are not yelling instructions or giving some long explanation from the stands. They can see frustration, discouragement, or negativity showing up before a word is ever spoken.

That has made me think about how easy it is for us as parents to miss things because we are moving all day long. There are dishes to clean, laundry to fold, schedules to keep straight, texts to answer, and somewhere in the middle of all of that our kids walk into the room and we ask a question while continuing to do something else.

“How was practice?”

“Good.”

And maybe it was good. Maybe it really was. At the same time, there are moments where their body language is asking for a little more from us, and if we are paying attention we can usually feel it.

I remember one season when my son made a travel basketball team and then unexpectedly told me he did not want to play on it. I kept asking him why, and every time he answered, something about the way he said it felt incomplete to me. The words never really changed, but his body language kept telling me there was more underneath it that he was not ready to say yet. A few weeks later he finally told me the real reason he did not want to play on that team, and we were able to address it.

That is why we need to put the dishes down, turn around, and actually face them when we ask how things are going. Sometimes what happens next lasts ten seconds, and sometimes it turns into something bigger that we would have missed if we kept staring into the sink, our phone, the TV, or a computer screen while we are in the same room.

Sometimes our kids stay there for another minute and talk. Sometimes they leave the room almost immediately. Either way, those moments are limited. One day they are walking into the kitchen after practice, and one day they are moving into their own place and building lives of their own, which makes those ordinary moments standing by the counter or the sink feel different the older your kids get.

Listen with your eyes.