If you have a distractible brain, you know this struggle intimately. Someone is speaking slowly, haltingly, taking forever to get to the point. Your mind races ahead. You want to finish their sentences. You're three steps beyond where they are, waiting impatiently for them to catch up.
This is hard enough with adults. But it becomes especially challenging—and especially important—with children.
Children deserve attentive engagement. They're developing communication skills. They're sharing things that matter to them, even if the delivery is meandering. And they notice when you're checked out, even if they can't articulate it.
Patience with slow speakers isn't a natural trait for distractible brains. It's a deliberate skill. Here's how to practice it.
Recall Your Own Halting Moments
Think about times when you struggled to express something. When your words came out jumbled or incomplete. When you needed someone to wait while you found your way to the point.
Remember what it felt like when someone showed you patience during those moments. The relief. The gratitude. The sense that you mattered enough for them to wait.
That memory becomes fuel for extending the same grace to others.
Invoke the Future
When listening to children, consider what lasting impression you want them to retain. In twenty years, how will they remember these moments?
Will they remember you as someone who was always distracted, always impatient, always somewhere else mentally? Or will they remember you as someone who was genuinely present? Someone who made them feel heard?
The answer to that question is being written right now, in this conversation.
Contextualize the Compassion
Abstract ideals of patience rarely survive contact with a slow speaker. "Be patient" as a general principle doesn't help when you're actually in the moment, struggling.
What helps is grounding your patience in the specific. This specific human in front of you. This specific relationship. This specific moment that will never come again.
Connect to the person, not the principle.
Patience with slow speakers represents a deliberate practice for distractible brains. It doesn't come naturally. It requires effort, intention, and strategies that work with your neurology rather than against it.
But here's what makes it worth the effort: the people in your life—especially the children—will remember how you made them feel. They'll remember whether you were present or distant. Patient or impatient. Interested or bored.
You have the power to shape those memories. Use it wisely.