A book can help with
For the child who talks over everyone, and the one who never feels heard.
Listening is a skill, not a manner, and children aren’t born with it. Some talk over everybody because they’re bursting with what they want to say. Others go quiet because they’ve worked out that nobody stops long enough to hear them. Both need the same thing: to see what proper listening actually looks like.
Books are unexpectedly good for this. Some are about characters learning to hear each other; others show a child at last being properly listened to, which is quietly moving. And reading aloud together is itself a small daily lesson in taking turns and paying attention.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Noticing what you hear
Listening starts a long way before it means paying attention to a person. At one and two it is noticing a sound, working out where it came from, and wanting it again. What follows is built for exactly that.
Press the button, hear the real recorded call, then find the bird on the page. Actual recordings rather than approximations, which is why a toddler presses it forty times in a row. The batteries are replaceable, which matters more than it sounds.
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A lift-the-flap hide and seek through a set of animals and the noises each of them makes, with thick flaps built for hands that pull rather than lift. The turn-taking of it, your noise and then theirs, is the first listening game there is.
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Each animal hears the next one and passes the question along, so a child is listening for what is coming rather than just being told. Carle’s zoo and a rhythm that pulls a three year old into joining in. The one on this page a child will still want at four.
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Taking turns to talk
At this age it’s about the basics: waiting your turn, and noticing when somebody needs to be heard rather than helped.
When Taylor’s tower falls down, every animal arrives with advice and only the rabbit sits quietly beside him, which turns out to be the only thing that helps. It’s the clearest possible lesson in what listening actually is. Genuinely useful for grown-ups too, and often quoted for good reason.
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A girl walks through a noisy day and gradually learns to sort the wall of sound into individual things worth hearing, ending with a friend who needs her. It turns listening into a skill you can practise, and it’s beautifully calm. Lovely for a busy, distractible child.
or on Bookshop.org
Being heard
Older children care a great deal about whether the grown-ups take them seriously. These are about being properly heard.
Jerome collects words he hears and loves, and discovers what they can do when he shares them with other people. It celebrates paying attention to language and to the people using it. A joyful book for the child who is either full of words or short of them.
or on Bookshop.org
Cally stops speaking because it seems to her that nobody is listening anyway, and the ones who eventually hear her are a blind boy and a large grey dog. Her mum has died, so there is real sadness under the dog story. Good for a child who has decided that their words do not land.
or on Bookshop.org
Being properly heard
At this age the complaint is usually that nobody listens, and it is very often accurate. These are about somebody with a great deal to say and no one paying attention.
Iris is deaf and very good with old radios, and when she hears about a whale singing at a frequency no other whale can hear, she recognises the situation immediately. Her own family talk over her constantly. Written by an author who worked as a sign language interpreter, and the detail shows.
or on Bookshop.org
Melody has cerebral palsy, cannot speak, and has a photographic memory that nobody around her has the first idea about. When she finally gets a device that speaks for her, the obstacle turns out not to be the technology. Furious in places, and rightly so.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page of listening games to play together, and a simple family rule for making sure everyone gets a turn at dinner. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Children learn listening almost entirely from being listened to. The habits form at your kitchen table, in whether their long story about the playground gets your full attention or half of it.
So put the phone down for the rambling anecdote, resist finishing their sentences, and let them see you listening to other people properly. A child who feels heard is a great deal more willing to hear anybody else.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults on listening and being heard.
Read the grown-up version →These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.