What a Year in a Children's Hospital Taught Me About Listening

My clinical internship at Rainbow Children's Hospital was a one-year immersion in paediatric psychology — IQ and developmental assessments, ADHD screenings, CARS evaluations, learning-disability profiles. On paper, it was a checklist of psychometric instruments. In practice, it was a masterclass in listening.

A child rarely tells you what is wrong. A parent often cannot. The work lives in the space between what is said and what is shown — the way a child holds a pencil, the way a mother answers a question about sleep with a half-second pause. I learned to take case histories that read like stories, because they are stories.

I also learned the discipline of evidence. Every observation had to survive supervision, case conferences, and the quiet scrutiny of a clinical report. Empathy opened the door; methodology kept me honest.

If I carry one thing from that year into organizational psychology, it is this: people in workplaces, like children in clinics, communicate long before they speak. Exit interviews are too late. The signals were always there — in meeting silences, in who stops contributing ideas, in the energy of a Monday morning.

Listening, it turns out, is a research method.