How to Talk So Kids Will Listen: Notes on Adele Faber
Table of Contents
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s a Tuesday morning. School starts in twenty minutes. My youngest can’t find his shoes. My middle one is melting down over not finding her hairbrush – again – and I have no idea where it is. My eldest is still in her room, door closed and hasn’t heard a word I’ve said in the last ten minutes.
And me? I, a woman who has spent the last three years studying Non-Violent Communication, who has read Marshall Rosenberg cover to cover three times, who sat through a six-day NVC intensive course – I am standing in the hallway saying: “HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU?”
At a very high volume.
There it is. Perfectly imperfect. That’s me. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish is the parenting book that finally gave me language for what was going wrong, and a practical way to think about how to talk so kids will listen when everyone is already dysregulated.
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen: What Adele Faber’s Book Teaches
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk was first published in 1980 and has sold over five million copies. Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish were students of the psychologist Haim Ginott, and this book distils his work into something incredibly practical – concrete scripts, real examples, drawings, exercises at the end of every chapter.
It is not a theory book. It is a doing book.
And I needed a doing book. Because I know the theory. I genuinely do. Knowing it and applying it at 7:45am when everyone is dysregulated and you’re already five minutes late – that’s a completely different discipline.
The Part That Stopped Me Cold
The central idea of this book is deceptively simple.
Children need to have their feelings acknowledged before they can hear anything else.
Full stop.
Not acknowledged and then fixed. Not acknowledged as a stepping stone to your very useful advice. Acknowledged – fully, genuinely – and then, only then, is there any space for problem-solving, solutions, or information.
I read that and thought: yes, of course, I know that. That’s NVC. That’s empathy before solution. I know this.
And then I thought about Tuesday morning.
Well, well, well…
Because knowing it and doing it are two completely different things – especially when you’re the one who also needs to get to work. When you’re tired. When you’ve already said it three times. When you genuinely cannot understand why the shoes are never, ever in the same place twice (even though you told them to put them away in the right place: where it lives in the house!).
Adele Faber makes this point gently but firmly: when we dismiss feelings (“you’re fine, stop crying”), minimise them (“it’s not that big a deal”), or jump straight to solutions (“just put your shoes by the door every night”), we short-circuit the child’s ability to actually hear us. Their brain is too busy trying to feel understood to receive any information. The advice lands nowhere.
Feelings first. Every time. Even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient.
What I Actually Changed
I started small. One technique, practised badly and then slightly less badly.
The one I tried first: naming the feeling instead of fixing or dismissing it.
My youngest comes home from school upset because a friend didn’t play with him at break. Old Sophie says: “Oh, don’t worry, he probably just wanted to play something different, you’ll play together tomorrow.” Which sounds kind. Which is also, apparently, completely useless – because what he heard was: your feelings are not a big deal and here is a quick solution so we can move on.
New Sophie – trying – says: “That sounds really disappointing. You were looking forward to playing with him.”
He burst into tears.
Not because I’d made it worse. Because for the first time, he felt genuinely heard. And then – I did not prompt this, I did not engineer it – he started talking. He told me about the whole week, not just that afternoon. He was upset about something that had been building for days, that I hadn’t even known about.
Because I stopped talking for once and just named what I saw.
I won’t pretend I do this consistently. Far from it, trust me. But when I manage it, the conversations are completely different.
The ADHD Piece
Two of my three children have been diagnosed with ADHD (the third in the pipeline…). Which means communication in our house is not just important – it is high-stakes in ways that parents of neurotypical children may not fully recognise.
A dysregulated ADHD brain cannot process information. It just cannot. When my middle one is in the middle of a meltdown, no amount of logic, explanation, or gentle redirection is going to reach her. The brain is in survival mode. It is not available for learning.
What the Adele Faber and Mazlish approach offers – feelings first, no lecture, no blame – is not just a communication technique for an ADHD child. It is neurologically necessary. You are not going to talk your way through the dysregulation. You have to wait for it to pass. And the fastest way to help it pass is to make the child feel understood, not corrected.
The accusatory approach – “you always do this,” “how many times,” “why can’t you just” – actively prolongs dysregulation. I have watched this happen in real time. The shame and blame make the brain less available, not more.
Adele Faber’s book gave me the language I needed for something I’d been observing intuitively for years.
The Techniques I Use Most
There are dozens of tools in this book. These are the ones that actually made it into my regular life.
Describe, don’t accuse. “There are wet towels on the bathroom floor” instead of “you ALWAYS leave your towels everywhere, I’ve told you a thousand times.” One describes a problem. The other attacks a person. Children – and adults – can respond to a described problem. They shut down when attacked. Even if the attack is deserved.
Say it in a word. “Towels.” They know. You don’t need the speech. And honestly, neither do you – because the speech is for your benefit, not theirs, and it does not work anyway.
Write a note. This one surprised me. Leaving a written note for my eldest is more effective than saying the same thing three times. Something about removing the eye contact, the tone, the charged atmosphere – a note arrives without all of that. She reads it. She responds to it. Witchcraft, basically.
I-statements, done properly. Not “I feel like you never listen” (which is an accusation wearing an I). But: “I feel exhausted when I ask three times and nothing happens.” The difference is specificity and honesty. It’s not a blame wrapped in a feeling – it’s an actual feeling, named.
Descriptive praise. This one genuinely changed something for me. Instead of “you’re so clever,” try “you stayed with that problem for a long time and worked it out.” Evaluative praise – “clever,” “brilliant,” “amazing” – creates anxiety about maintaining the label. Descriptive praise builds actual confidence. It tells the child what they did, not who they are.
Practical Takeaways
If you read nothing else, take these:
- Acknowledge the feeling before anything else. Name it. “That sounds really frustrating.” “You’re disappointed.” No fixing, no minimising. Just: I see you.
- Describe the problem, never the person. “The kitchen is a mess” lands differently than “you’re so messy.”
- One word. Often one word is enough. Try it.
- Leave a note. For the things that go badly in person every single time – write it down instead.
- Descriptive praise only. Describe what you see. Let them draw their own conclusions about who they are.
- Labels limit. The child you call “the anxious one” or “the difficult one” will live inside that label. Watch the words you use to describe your children – to others, and to them.
- Problem-solve together. Ask “what can we do so this doesn’t happen again?” – calmly, not as a rhetorical weapon. Treat them as capable of finding solutions. They usually are.
Related Notes from Soph
If this note on How to Talk So Kids Will Listen by Adele Faber helped, you might also like these connected Notes from Soph:
- The Orchid and the Dandelion, for a gentler way to understand sensitive children.
- Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, for attachment, repair and staying close.
- What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, for the nervous-system lens underneath behaviour.
- Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, for feelings, needs and learning to repair when words come out wrong.
Why This Belongs in Heart
I put this in the Heart category because that’s exactly where it lives.
This is not a productivity book. It is not about efficiency or optimising your morning routine. It is about the quality of connection you have with the small people you love most – and how easy it is, even with the best intentions and a full shelf of personal development books, to get it consistently wrong.
I am a teacher. I know how to explain things. I know how to manage a classroom, how to adapt my communication to different learners, how to give feedback that builds rather than crushes. And I come home and I say “HOW MANY TIMES” and I dismiss and I lecture and I repeat myself in an increasingly loud voice.
Because my own children activate something in me that my students never could. The stakes feel different. The tiredness is different. The history is different.
Adele Faber’s book doesn’t fix that. Nothing fixes that. But it gives me something to reach for when I remember – when I’m present enough, when I’m not already running on empty – to reach for it.
Et toi? Est-ce que tu reconnais ce moment? That moment where you know exactly what you should say and you say the opposite anyway? I would genuinely love to know if any of this lands for you.
I am not a parenting expert. I am still figuring it out, one Tuesday morning at a time. But Adele Faber’s book is worth going back to. That tells you something.
Pick it up. Read a chapter. Try one technique this week – just one. And be gentle with yourself when you forget.
Learning, not perfection. Always.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Did any of this resonate? Leave a comment below – I read every single one. And if you know a parent who needs to hear this today, share it with them.
Book Details:
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk – Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish
First published 1980 | Revised edition 2012 | Scribner
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1451663889/?tag=websitenote0f-21
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