Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Miller

Miller’s line is a quiet rebuke to the adult habit of calling our interpretations “wisdom.” She frames learning not as something we extract from children but as something that happens to us when we surrender the usual hierarchy: expert over novice, parent over child, therapist over patient. The phrase “result of listening” flips the standard script. We typically treat listening as the polite prelude to what we really came to do - advise, correct, diagnose. Miller insists listening is the engine, not the warm-up.

The circular structure matters: listening produces learning, which improves listening, which deepens attentiveness. That feedback loop is the point. Empathy isn’t a moral accessory you put on to be a better caretaker; it’s a skill that strengthens with practice, and it’s inseparable from humility. “To learn from the child” carries a buried accusation: adults often don’t want to learn. They want compliance, reassurance, proof they’re doing it right. Miller’s psychology, famously attentive to how childhood wounds are minimized or rationalized, treats that refusal to listen as a cultural defense mechanism.

Contextually, her work sits in a postwar, post-Freud landscape where “good upbringing” could still mean disciplined silence and emotional denial. The quote argues that the child is not merely a developing adult but a person with data - feelings, perceptions, pain - that adults routinely override. Miller’s intent is practical and radical: if you want a healthier psyche (yours or theirs), you start by granting the child reality, and you do it through the hardest tool we have: sustained, non-performative attention.