Parenting Pointers - Listening

In a time of constant noise—tweets, headlines, hot takes, and 10-second videos—we’re consuming more than ever, yet understanding less. As polarization grows, conversations stall, and attention spans shrink, one critical skill has quietly eroded: listening.

From the rise of digital multitasking and algorithm-driven echo chambers to the pressure of always needing a response, we’re living in a world that rewards speaking, not understanding.
Listening, once a foundation of empathy and collaboration, now feels like a lost art.  Why is this?  How can we listen better?  How is not fully listening affecting us?

I had a chance to interview Christine Miles, author of the award winning and critically acclaimed book, What Is It Costing You Not To Listen and founder of The Listening Path®. Miles says that to listening is affecting our daily life from work to relationships to even political division. Not fully listening is disconnecting us from others. It is also a major cause for burnout at the workplace she says. She has 5 easy tips on how we can listen better.  

1. Why does it seem like listening is a lost art?

Listening feels like a lost art, largely because our world has been transformed by technology, speed, and constant distraction. Today’s communication often happens in sound bites, emails, social media alerts, and text messages. We rarely have full conversations or in-person interactions like we used to, which means we’re spending much less time actually practicing the act of listening.

Listening has always been a ubiquitous skill, present everywhere and essential to our lives, but it remains widely misunderstood. We don’t even share a clear definition of what it means to be a good listener. The concept of “active listening,” originally developed by psychologists in 1957, was meant to help us truly understand the speaker’s mindset and the deeper meaning behind their words. But over time, active listening has been oversimplified into a checklist of behaviors that can become more about appearing to listen than genuinely seeking to understand. In our modern world, we’re trying to use an antiquated and overly complicated approach to listening, one that doesn’t work in an environment shaped by technology and constant distraction and ultimately sets us up to fail.  

2. How does it affect our relationships to not fully listen?

Listening is largely invisible in relationships, yet it’s life-sustaining, much like oxygen. Just as we need to breathe to survive, relationships need listening to thrive. Without it, the connection withers and can ultimately die. Listening holds the power to both hurt and heal: the absence of listening can create wounds, while listening to understand has the capacity to restore and strengthen our bonds.

The challenge is that we immediately feel the pain when someone isn’t listening to us, but we’re often unaware when we are the ones not listening. As a result, we inflict small wounds, each one seeming insignificant on its own, but over time, these wounds accumulate until our relationships are left bleeding. 

3. How can we work to improve our listening and empathy skills?

It starts with intention. Unfortunately, listening is often treated as automatic, something we assume comes naturally. We have two legs and learn to walk, and we have two ears and assume we will learn to listen. But listening and hearing are very different. Hearing is a sense you are born with; listening is a skill that must be nurtured and developed.

Empathy is one of the most misunderstood parts of listening. Many believe you must be empathetic before you can truly listen, but in reality, it’s the act of listening that helps us build empathy, not the other way around. It’s like watching an emotionally rich movie: the more powerful the story, the more we step into the world of the characters. As listeners, we need to learn to shine a light on both the facts and the emotions being shared. This is how we strengthen our ability to listen to understand, and, in turn, grow our empathy muscle.

4. Why is it important to take the time to truly listen?

Listening is critical for many reasons. In both personal and professional relationships, when you shine a light on someone’s story, you help them feel heard, seen, and understood. This builds trust and meaningful connection. But listening isn’t just a soft skill, it’s a strategic advantage. Listening to understand helps you learn more effectively, builds emotional intelligence, and minimizes misunderstandings, which can be costly at home and at work. It enables more critical thinking and helps you get to the root cause of problems.

When you listen in a way that shines a light on what isn’t said, you earn the right to influence, lead, advise, solve problems, and sell. Ironically, by truly listening to understand, you earn the privilege to be heard yourself.

5. How has social media and technology affected our listening skills?

The statistics on screen time are staggering; adults now average about 6 hours and 40 minutes per day, children ages 11–18 spend around 7.5 hours, and those 8–10 years old spend 6.5 hours daily on screens. It’s more than just shortened attention spans and reduced focus, every hour spent on screens is an hour not spent in face-to-face conversations, which are essential for building empathy, conversation, and listening skills. 

While technology connects us digitally, it’s disconnecting us interpersonally. As a result, our already weak “listening muscle” is atrophying even further, making genuine connection and real understanding more difficult than ever.

In addition, the rapid pace and fragmented nature of digital communication, social media posts, instant messages, and notifications, encourage us to skim, multitask, and respond quickly rather than give our full attention to a conversation.  Listening” has become more performative, often reduced to a quick reaction (such as a like or emoji), rather than truly engaging with someone’s thoughts and feelings. This contributes to misunderstandings and makes it harder to pick up on emotional cues or deeper meaning.

For young people in particular, whose social skills and emotional intelligence are still developing, the decline in real-time, in-person exchanges can mean fewer opportunities to practice attentive listening and to learn the empathy essential for healthy relationships. 

Ultimately, as technology continues to shape our interactions, it’s more important than ever to shine a light on the value of real listening and to intentionally create spaces, at home, in classrooms, and in the workplace, where meaningful, focused conversations can take place. By doing so, we can help reverse this trend and rebuild the skills needed for true understanding and connection.

6. How does listening or not listening well affect students in school?

Listening is a foundational 21st-century skill, sitting at the very heart of the 4 Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. When teachers and classmates truly listen to understand, students feel valued and included, which leads to greater engagement, trust, and academic success. In today’s fast-paced, distracted world, prioritizing listening unlocks students’ potential and creates the conditions for deeper learning and meaningful connection.

Conversely, when listening breaks down, the effects can be swift and harmful. Students who don’t feel heard may become disengaged, anxious, or isolated, resulting in decreased motivation and missed opportunities for growth. Misunderstandings and overlooked needs not only impact student achievement but can also erode a student’s confidence and sense of belonging.

Listening is much more than a “soft skill, “ it anchors positive classroom dynamics and strengthens empathy and teamwork. When classrooms foster listening to understand, conflicts lessen, collaboration deepens, and students become more supportive of each other. Ultimately, when we shine a light on students’ stories by listening to understand, we set the stage for lifelong learning, connection, and lasting success.

7. At what age should we begin learning how to listen?

Listening is included in every set of core curriculum standards for both teachers and students, yet there is rarely any formal education on how to teach listening as a skill. Too often, listening is simply reduced to telling children to pay attention, wait their turn, or let someone else speak. Instead, we should begin intentionally teaching listening from the earliest years, helping children understand that listening is an essential skill to be practiced and developed, not just a behavior to be managed. Listening is a lifelong skill that should be formally taught starting in elementary school. The earlier children develop this vital ability, the better prepared they will be for success both in school and throughout their lives.

8. How can parents and teachers work together to teach proper listening skills?

Since most adults and children have never been formally taught to listen, it’s a skill they can, and should, learn together. The key is developing a simple, shared approach to listening that works for all ages. When parents and teachers model and use the same tools and language, children receive consistent reinforcement both at home and at school.

Collaboration is also essential. Teachers can share classroom resources and strategies, while parents can practice these skills at home during mealtimes, bedtime, or by setting aside intentional moments to listen.

When adults truly listen to children and openly share their own experiences with learning to listen, it sends a powerful message: listening matters, and everyone can improve. By making listening a shared learning experience, parents and teachers strengthen relationships, all while laying the foundation for lifelong connection and success.

9. How does listening or not listening affect us at the workplace?

There’s a crisis hiding in plain sight within organizations. If you could shine a light throughout your workplace, you would see misunderstandings everywhere: between colleagues, with customers, in budget discussions, and during team and project meetings. The costs are extraordinary; wasted time and resources spent solving the wrong problems, ongoing conflict, silos, disengagement, and lost sales and revenue. Poor listening underlies so many workplace challenges.

What makes this crisis especially difficult to address is that it often goes unnoticed or unspoken. The symptoms, missed deadlines, finger-pointing, employee turnover, and strained client relationships, are visible, but the root cause is rarely identified as a breakdown in listening. Teams may become stuck in cycles of miscommunication, with frustration quietly building as voices go unheard and assumptions go untested. Over time, morale erodes and opportunities for collaboration and innovation are lost. In this environment, even high-performing teams can begin to fray, and organizations risk losing both their best people and their competitive edge.

10. What would you recommend to businesses to help their employees to listen better?

Put listening at the center of your company’s values and daily practices and truly mean it. Invest real time and resources in teaching listening as a skill at all levels, using a simple, repeatable approach that creates a common language and understanding across your teams. Make it clear that the purpose of listening is not just to be silent or wait politely while others speak, but to seek genuine understanding.

Encourage employees to “shine a light” in every interaction so people feel heard, seen, and understood. When organizations do this, perspectives, needs, and feelings that are often overlooked or ignored come to the surface. This is when trust is built, people share real challenges, and your teams can finally address root issues, instead of just reacting to surface-level symptoms.