Drawing from his lifelong personal and professional experience, Paul Madaule brings the listening function to life and sheds light on the most important, and sometimes,  unexpected  or paradoxical aspects of listening.

Starting to take shape well before birth, listening plays an essential role in the child’s sensorimotor, social-emotional and cognitive development. It is a guiding force behind attention coordination, voice production, musical skills, written language, sense of being grounded, centered and in control.

Listening is the child’s silent companion during all his developing years and it continues to be so all along adult life, so quiet that we tend to take it for granted. This is a paradox of listening: when working well, it is effortless, spontaneous and automatic but when it is not,it becomes a noisy “squeaky wheel”. Teachers begin to comment that the child “doesn’t listen” “doesn’t pay attention” and “cannot focus”. This is when speech is choppy, body movements are clumsy, the child is fidgety, and his behavior;off beat; or ‘out of sync. How can you identify a listening problem by observing a child’s facial expressions, eye contact, body posture, and his voice quality when talking, singing or reading? How can listening be protected, nurtured and and even enriched at home and at school? How can listening be exercised? These are some of the questions we will discuss during this presentation.

Paul Madaule is the Director of the Listening Centre in Toronto that he founded with Dr.Tomatis in 1978. The Listening Centre was the first clinical facility to use the Tomatis Method in North America. Paul has also helped created a dozen Centres throughout the US and Latin America, Mexico in particular.