Listen to your child to train him to listen, says Valentina Trivedi, writer, story teller and educator

I call myself a ‘Childist’; like we have feminists I am a ‘Childist’ because I look at things from a child’s perspective. The child inside me is still very alive and kicking and I can’t not look at the world from a child’s perspective! I do teacher training programs, story-telling performances, stand-alone sessions and ticketed sessions at literature festivals and events.

One of your core strengths is story telling. You believe deeply in its power…
Well, I started connecting with stories before I could sit up. I grew up in a pre-television, pre-computer age and I’m an only child, so story books were my soul mates. I had very understanding adults around me; my parents, and I had some great teachers and they always gave me that space which is what is lacking in children’s lives today. They are not getting the space to let their mind wander and that’s where learning actually happens.

There is just far too much teaching and not enough learning. And also in this too much teaching, curriculum, jargon, short term outcomes we forget that education is actually a long term process. It’s not like boiling an egg. This is something that is going to last a lifetime, you are building it for a lifetime. So we can’t be measuring everything with short term goals. That is the kind of learning that comes through stories and with children given that space and through positive inputs.

I never say anything negative to children as they are very special people. It’s the adults around them that make things go wrong. Children are amazing; they come up with the most original ideas and have completely new perspectives to do things. I love creating stories or songs with them.

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I would like to share a little song. There are these two little girls who come over to my place who are of different age groups. We were playing and doing mimes. I have a lot of hand puppets. We decided that one of us would create a story and two of us would create a song around it.

So the story was about a koel (cuckoo) and a kauva (crow) and the song went like this…

Ek tha kauva, ek thi koel….

Ek tha kauva, ek thi koel….

Kauva Mr. Basu aur koel Mrs. Goyal

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Kauva Mr. Basu aur koel Mrs. Goyal

So this is the kind of wackiness that a child has. A lot of the times the adults just push it aside and say ‘It’s not there in the course or curriculum. Where is this going to get you?’ This is what is going to get you to the other places. Not to be a frontrunner in a herd, but to leap above that. The creativity leap! Children are not able to find an outlet for their creativity or curiosity. And that is what I feel very passionately about. I live in a colony which has children of all ages and I interact with them.

As children grow older, does it get more difficult to ignite their imagination, this spark in them?
I would definitely suggest that parents do it at a much younger age. For any other job you require a qualification, prior knowledge or some work experience. But parenting is the only thing that we are allowed to get into without doing a thing about it and I really think it’s unfair! I often tell adults if children knew what they were entitled to and what they are missing out on, all us adults would be behind bars!

When you say igniting the spark it’s a big thing. They are just big terms. You have to go back to the basics. You have to go back to simple things that are always going to hold true. The world is changing very quickly. There is technology; the amount of change that has happened due to technology in the last 30 years is massive and it’s going to keep changing. But there are some things that are going to be constant. So I say, connect with your child and when I say that it doesn’t mean your child is sitting with you and you are sitting with your cell phone. So if you have a problem with your child’s screen time, look at how much screen time you are giving yourself.

When my son was younger and we used to go on holidays, wherever there was a television in the room we never switched it on. It was not an enforced rule but it’s just something he grew up with. Each of us carried our books and board games. Parents have to be very conscious about the world they need to be nurtured in. I would like to say ‘Bachpan’ has two syllables. ‘Bach’ and ‘pan’ – bachana kya hai aur panapane kya dena hai. A lot of things are naturally inherent to children, which are divine, and we kind of strangle it out of them. So that’s why it has to start early.

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In today’s age where we are online 24/7, how can story-telling still be relevant?
Ah! It is surprising to me also that it is so relevant. And with passing time I become more and more aware of its relevance. At the surface of it, it feels like a form of entertainment. You tell a story and a child is happy or an adult is happy and that’s it, but the kind of cognitive development that happens when a child is listening to a story is amazing. That can’t be taught. It’s like osmosis the way the learning happens. So you have to allow that to happen. It will not happen if the child is staring at a screen. Of course there are challenging games (digital) but it’s when they are forming their own pictures in their mind, when there is no picture to support the audio, that their imagination is growing.

During teacher training programs I ask the teachers, ‘So what is the big deal about imagination? You can get your marks in maths and science, so why imagination?’ A lot of them are not able to answer this question. The minute you say storytelling you have somebody saying ‘But imagination is required’ and then somebody will realise that without imagination we won’t be where we are. Like man imagined he could fly and so we have aeroplanes today. The other thing is because of our cell phones and other devices the attention span is greatly reduced. You are flipping channels. The minute you don’t like something you flip and flip and flip the channels. So listening to stories enhances your attention span. You learn to pay attention.

We pay a lot of attention to communication skills, and yet it still means just public speaking or speaking confidently or speaking well, but that’s just one half of it. The other half of communication is listening. How are we teaching listening? We are not even paying attention, other that telling a child ‘Listen to me’. I tell parents who say this to their child that if you haven’t taught your child to cycle is it fair to ask him to get onto it and start pedalling? And they said no. So I ask them, ‘Have you taught him to listen?’ ‘Yes of course we keep telling him to listen every day!’ But telling is different, have you ensured that he has learnt to listen. How do you ensure listening? You model it. You show him by listening to him. So listen to your children. You will have a better relation with your child if you will listen more to them than telling them to listen.

This interview appeared in the September 2017 issue of ScooNews magazine.

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