“Hang on buddy, I’m talking to someone.”
I used to say some version of that most days. It seemed reasonable enough. I was mid-conversation with someone else, and my son needed to wait a beat. I told myself I was being patient. Mostly I was just waiting for the interruption to end so I could get back to whatever I’d decided mattered more.
Then one day I looked over and caught his shoulders dip. Not dramatically. Nothing anyone else in the room would have noticed. But something in him had dimmed, just slightly, and I felt the ache of it land before I understood why. He wasn’t angry. He’d simply faded. He didn’t need me to drop what I was doing. He needed to know he still existed inside the shape of my attention.
So I changed one thing. Instead of asking him to wait, I looked up, met his eyes, and said, “Let me finish this, and in five minutes I’m all yours.” Then I made sure I actually was. Every time.
It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was the follow-through. Over weeks, the interruptions softened, not because he’d learned to be patient, but because he’d learned to trust the return. There’s research behind this. Children’s nervous systems settle not through perfect parenting but through consistency, through being met. Dan Siegel calls it “mindsight,” the capacity to feel felt, and he treats it as a cornerstone of emotional resilience. It doesn’t ask for a breakthrough. It asks for a pause and a turn toward.
My sons are eighteen and sixteen now. There’s less wrestling, more sarcasm tossed across the dinner table like a lazy frisbee. But I still catch the sideways glance that seems to ask whether it’s safe to say something out loud, and I still have to choose, in that half second, whether to stay buried in whatever felt urgent or to turn toward it.
I don’t always catch it. But I know now what’s at stake in the missing.
What changed wasn’t my patience. It was learning that presence has to be provable, not just felt on my end.
My book “Shut Up: A Journey into the Lost Art of Listening” is available on Amazon if you want to go further with this.
