Building a Listening Partnership

Welcome to Building a Listening Partnership: Easing the Stress of Parenting!

Welcome to your self-guided class! I hope this note will help you make good use of this course.

With this class, we hope to help you build good support for the challenging work of parenting. We parents want to love our children well, and we want to give them the best of our guidance every day. But parenting is emotional work! Our children’s emotions are a lot to handle, and so are our own. At Hand in Hand Parenting, we’ve found that Listening Partnerships give us a way to expand our patience, recover our love, and a way to summon up the best in ourselves through both good times and hard. And seeing our Listening Partner change and grow, thanks to our listening, is a privilege as well. 

Please view the videos in the order they are presented. The class segments and examples have been carefully structured to bring you information about listening and being a listener in the most understandable way.

Please plan on spending time with our videos and examples. You’ll have access to the materials in this classroom for a year, so feel free to take the steps slowly, and to go back over the videos and charts more than once.

The class materials are organized into three classes. You’ll find the videos for each class under the Modules tab on the left side of your screen. There you’ll also find a course outline with the running times of each video segment and example, and a list of the listening skills or parenting topics covered in each example.

Begin with the Lesson 1, Video 1. The topics follow the outline of the Listening Partnerships for Parents booklet. That booklet is included with this course in .pdf format. Please do read it. Our minds learn most efficiently when information can be absorbed through a variety of pathways! Pages 1-32 cover the topics taught in Classes 1 and 2.  The rest of the booklet outlines the concepts presented in Class 3. 

To find a Listening Partner, we recommend asking a fellow parent you respect to try the experiment with you. Ask them to read Listening Partnerships for Parents, and dive in! If you can’t think of someone you’d like to have as your Listening Partner, you can join our online community (Links to an external site.), and send a post asking for interested parents.

In Modules, you’ll find the charts shown in the videos, posted at the end of each class. In addition, you’ll find a short primer on the topic of “Refresher Questions;” a handout on the feelings common to most parents, and how to counter them; and a handout on the guidelines to use when you engage a close family member in a Listening Partnership. 

May your pleasure in parenting grow as you use Listening Partnerships to improve life for yourself and your children!

With thanks for the good work you do,

 Patty Wipfler