The transforming effect of undivided attention

You can listen to me reading this blog using the player below

While I was growing up, my dad was the Pastor of a church in inner-city Liverpool.

It was a tough neighbourhood, with more than its fair share of social issues, crime and deprivation. So there was a steady stream of people coming to our house and to Dad’s office, looking for help and support. He took his calling very seriously and, as a result, he was always busy.

Liverpool was a divided city in those days and, as is often the case, religious differences were a convenient excuse for a lot of violent behaviour. Under those conditions, it was not cool to have a dad who was the Pastor of a church and I was getting badly bullied.

It got so bad that the school would let me out a few minutes ahead of everyone else so that I could make my way home through the back alleyways and avoid being beaten up by one, or other, of the gangs that had formed in our area.

It was a grim time, that I would not want to repeat, but in the middle of all the fighting, the name calling and the isolation, I had one anchor that kept me secure - home.

My parents did a fantastic job of creating a safe, stable and happy environment for my sister, my brother and me to grow up in and I have hundreds of good memories of home in those days.

Ultimately, I had to find my own way to overcome the bullying but I was only able to do that because of the consistent affirmation of my parents and the confidence that gave me. I never took on the identity of “victim” and I never saw myself as “weak”. Like most children, I took the measure of my worth from my father’s opinion of me and it was only later in life that I realised just how fortunate I had been to have a dad who was so consistently encouraging.

He was very strict and certainly did not suffer fools gladly but I never doubted for a second that I mattered and that I was important to him. He said many encouraging things to me, over the years, but my abiding memory of those Liverpool days is of my father looking up from his desk when I went into his bedroom office after school, putting down his pen, sitting me next to him and asking me about my day.

I never remember him asking me to “wait” or to “come back in 5 minutes” and, when we were talking, he would never do anything else but listen. It was this undivided attention that spoke most eloquently of his feelings for me and his opinion about me. That was my bedrock; My secure foundation.

I am sure there were many things going through his mind and many pressing problems to be solved. So the fact that he was willing to put them to one side and focus on me gave me a confidence and sense of self-worth that has enabled me to weather some pretty big storms in the years that have followed.

In turn, I have tried to do the same for my own girls. Nowadays, it is easy because I love talking to them so much but, in the early years, when they were tiny and their days were defined by events that seemed rather trivial to me, it was the knowledge of what my own dad’s undivided attention had meant to me that kept me listening.

In our modern, inter-connected world with so many communication channels demanding our attention, it is rare to give our undivided attention to anything, but the simple gift of our time and attention can have a transforming effect on our kids.