When They Stop Talking to You

The shift, when it comes, is rarely dramatic. There is no fight, no door slammed, no moment a parent can point to and say that is when it changed. There is, instead, a Tuesday in October when the parent realises that the conversation in the car back from school, the one that used to be the day’s small reliable thing, has been a series of single syllables for about three weeks. How was it. Fine. The phone is out before the seatbelt is on. The teenager is upstairs before the parent has lifted the shopping out of the boot.

The parent stands in the hall, holding two bags of pasta and a packet of crumpets, and registers that the child who, eighteen months ago, would not stop talking about her day has become the teenager who tells her nothing.

This is one of the most disorienting transitions in parenting, and the parent going through it tends to assume she is the only one. She is, more or less, every parent of a thirteen-year-old. The disorientation is the disorientation of having been the most important person in someone’s life and watching, in real time, the demotion.

What is actually happening

A teenager who stops talking to her parents is, in the great majority of cases, doing exactly what the developmental task requires of her. Adolescence is, among other things, the project of building a self that is not a smaller version of the parent. To do that, she needs an inner life that is not, at every turn, narrated to the adults who raised her. The silence is the room in which that inner life gets built.

This is not reassurance but mechanism. The teenage brain is reorganising. The peer group is becoming the primary social mirror. The opinions that matter most are those of the four other fourteen-year-olds in the WhatsApp group, not those of the woman in the kitchen who still asks if she has done her homework. The child is not holding thoughts back because she has stopped loving her mother but because she is testing what it is to have thoughts that are her own.

The conversations that do still happen are now selected for. They are not the whole day downloaded; they are the things she has decided, on some level, to share. It is more intimate than the chatter of eight; it just looks like less.

There is also an indignity in it that parents rarely say out loud. The person you have given fourteen years of your attention to is now the person who finds your questions tedious and your presence in the kitchen mildly embarrassing. The eye-roll is not invented; it is an actual eye-roll, directed at you, for asking how her day was. The parent who pretends it does not sting is often the one who ends up snapping three days later. Better to name it. The indignity is part of the deal.

When the silence is something else

Most of the time, the silence is developmental. Some of the time, it is not only that, and the parent’s question is the right one: is this normal, or is something happening. There is no clean test, and we would distrust anyone who offered one. There are, though, textures we look for in clinical practice, and that a parent can look for too.

A teenager withdrawing developmentally is usually withdrawing from the parent specifically. She is still talking to her friends. She is still on the phone in her room. She is still going out on Saturday. The friend group is intact, or rearranging in the way friend groups rearrange at fourteen. School is, broadly, happening. Sleep is wrong, because teenage sleep is wrong, but it is wrong in the recognisable way: late to bed, hard to wake, sleeping the weekend off.

A teenager whose silence is part of something larger is often also withdrawing from the friend group. The phone is quieter, not noisier. The Saturday plans have stopped. The bedroom door, which used to have music behind it, has nothing. Appetite has changed. The mood is flat in a way that does not lift when something good happens.

That second picture is the one to take seriously, without panic. The difference between a teenager doing adolescence and one who is struggling is not in any single sign; it is in the accumulation, the duration, and the parent’s own sense, which is usually accurate, that something is off.

If you are in the second picture, the move is not to corner her but to lower the threshold for any conversation, and to start thinking, in parallel, about what professional support might look like. Your GP is the gateway to NHS routes; CAMHS waiting lists are real, which is why the parent who notices early is best placed to help.

What not to do

The instinct, when a teenager falls silent, is to ask more questions. To organise a sit-down. To say, with the best of intentions, “we used to be so close, what has changed”. We would gently ask you not to do any of these things.

The sit-down conversation is, for a teenager, almost intolerable. It places her in the spotlight at the moment she is trying to step out of it, and signals that the parent has decided the silence is a problem to be solved, which positions the teenager as the problem.

The line we used to be so close is worse. However lovingly meant, it is a piece of grief the parent is asking the teenager to repair. She cannot; she is the cause of it, in the sense that she is the one growing up. Asking her to manage your sadness about that is a request she cannot meet, and she will withdraw further.

The interrogation, finally, never produces what it is looking for. “Are you alright. Are you sure. You would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you.” The teenager will say yes and mean nothing by it. The information you want is not coming through the front door. You need to leave the side door open.

There is one specific moment worth naming, because almost every parent gets it wrong. It is the minute when the door opens after school. The teenager walks in; the parent, who has been thinking about her all afternoon, opens with “how was it, did you see Maya, what did you have for lunch”. The teenager, who has been performing social legibility for seven hours, has nothing left to give to the front door. She gives the single syllable and goes upstairs, and the rejection feeds the next afternoon’s slightly sharper question. What works is, almost embarrassingly, to say nothing at all. Hello and a smile and back to whatever you were doing. The kitchen becomes, slowly, a place she comes back into rather than the place she escapes from.

What does work

The side door is the activity that is not about the conversation. The car journey, the dog walk, the trip to the supermarket, the late-night kitchen visit when she has come down for a snack. These are the conversations teenagers actually have with their parents. The shared activity gives her the dignity of not being looked at while she is talking, and gives the parent something to do with her face while she is listening, which is harder than it sounds.

One thing that works is the question that is not a question. “I was wondering whether Maya has been around much this term”, said in the car, with neither of you looking at the other, and then a silence the parent does not fill. She either answers or does not. If she does not, you have lost nothing; the question is on the table. The mistake is to ask the same thing with a question mark and an expectant face, which turns it into an interview.

The dinner eaten in silence is a thing parents take harder than they need to. The teenager who has nothing to say at supper is not punishing the family; she is using the supper to refuel. Let the silence be the silence. Talk to your partner about the rest of the day, let the radio do some of the work, keep your eyes on your own plate. After three or four such suppers, she will say something. Not at this one. At the fourth one. The kitchen, with a teenager standing at the counter eating, is the room in which more is said, in passing, than in any planned conversation; be, sometimes, the parent just making a cup of tea when she walks in, and then ask whether she wants one.

The teenager’s friend in the house is its own moment, and parents over-perform it. The friend is not an opportunity; she is a guest. A hello, a help yourselves to anything in the fridge, then withdraw. The teenager wants to be seen having a friend; she does not want the friend interrogated.

Presence without demand is the phrase we find ourselves using. It is the willingness to be in the room, on the sofa, in the same general airspace, without requiring the teenager to do anything with you. It feels like doing nothing; in fact it is availability without intrusion, which is more or less the entire parental task of the adolescent decade.

For parents of girls in this stage, the book we keep recommending is Lisa Damour’s Untangled, which lays out the seven strands of adolescent development without flattening them into slogans. For the neuroscience behind all of this, Daniel Siegel’s Brainstorm is the clearest writing for a general audience we have come across; the chapter on the adolescent reorganisation of the brain is the part that helps most, because once you have read it, the eye-roll in the car becomes legible as something other than a personal insult.

When a teenager is going through something, the answer is not yet formal therapy, and the parent is the person she will not talk to, we point parents to Kooth: a free, anonymous online support service for young people, commissioned by the NHS in many parts of the UK, giving her the option of typing rather than talking to a counsellor she will not face in school the next day. Check availability via the postcode lookup. Childline is also there, free and twenty-four hours, and the YoungMinds parents helpline is the right line for the parent who needs to be listened to rather than read at.

At different ages

The retreat is, almost entirely, a pre-teen and teen phenomenon, and the parent’s part in it shifts noticeably across those years. The bands below are descriptions, not boxes; some children begin to retreat at ten, others not until fourteen. The pattern matters more than the year on the calendar.

If your child is between nine and eleven. The first quietness is, in most houses, here. Pre-secondary self-consciousness is arriving; she has registered that not everything she thinks needs to be reported to you, and the supper conversation has begun to thin. This is not yet the silence of adolescence proper; it is the small drawing-back that precedes it. In this band, resist the instinct to interpret the thinning as a problem to fix. Carry on with the after-school rhythms, ask less rather than more, and notice the conversations that do still happen, which are often the bedtime ones and the in-the-car ones, and let those run as long as they want to.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. This is the band the chapter is mostly written for. The peer group has reorganised, the WhatsApp economy is now the social environment, and the kitchen has stopped being the room she wants to debrief in. The approach is the one set out above: presence without demand, the side-door conversation, the kitchen-as-a-place-she-comes-back-into rather than the kitchen-as-the-place-of-the-interview. The single specific move that helps most in this band is the silent re-entry: when she walks in after school, hello and a smile and back to whatever you were doing. Save the questions for later. Save most of them for never.

If your child is mid-teen, thirteen to sixteen. The silence is now the established mode, and the conversations that do still happen are increasingly the ones she chooses. Your part is to make the chosen ones easier to have. The car at half past nine on the way back from her friend’s house, with the radio on low. The kitchen at half past ten when she comes down for a snack and stays for forty minutes because you have stopped asking and started listening. Where the picture warrants it, go adult-on-adult: ask her once whether she would like to see her own counsellor, say that you would help her find one, and then leave the offer on the table without pressing. The BACP and NCPS directories are searchable for counsellors working with adolescents; in many areas Kooth is available without going through the GP at all.

If your child is in late secondary, sixteen to eighteen. The silence at this age is often less the developmental withdrawal of fourteen and more a sign that she is, in some sense, already gone. Her life is increasingly outside the house; her friendships are now the ones that will travel with her; her interior life is being assembled in places you are not invited into. Negotiate the new adult-to-adult terms of the relationship while she is still living with you. Treat the conversation she does have with you as a piece of her adult life, not a piece of her childhood. Ask her opinion on things and listen to the answer. The shift you are making, in this band, is from being her parent to becoming, slowly, one of the adults in her life.

If your child is eighteen and beyond. The silence has a different cause now. She is calling less because she is busy living the life you have spent eighteen years preparing her for. The job now is restraint. Be the parent who answers when called rather than the parent who calls. Send the message that does not require a reply. Resist the urge, when she is home for a weekend, to make up for three months of conversation in two days; the long conversation she will have with you at twenty-five is the one she will have because the visits at nineteen were easy, not because they were full.

The longer arc

No one tells the parent, in the middle of this, how much they miss the relationship as it was. The eight-year-old who told you about the dinosaur facts. The eleven-year-old who, the night before the first day of secondary school, came and sat on the end of your bed because she could not sleep. Those people are still in the teenager you have now, but they are not, for now, available, and the grief is real.

The relationship that returns in the early twenties is a new one, between an adult and an adult, and often has more in it than the previous one did. There is no honourable way through those years that does not involve sitting through the silence and holding the door open, day after day, without making the door an issue.

The teenager will not, this year or next, thank you for it. She may, in eight years’ time, sit at your kitchen table on a visit home and tell you something, without preamble, that you had no idea she had been carrying. The door was open. She walked through it. That is what the door is for.

NOTES

1. Damour, Lisa. Untangled. Atlantic, 2017. The developmental tasks of adolescence framework: Damour’s reading of the seven landings teenagers move through.
2. Siegel, Daniel J.. Brainstorm. Tarcher, 2014. Siegel’s account of the adolescent brain remodel and the integration model that runs through it.

Where to go further

Lisa Damour, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood Named in the body of this chapter. The book we put into the hands of parents of adolescent girls more than any other; the seven-strand frame is the cleanest writing we know on what your teenager is actually doing in the silence.

Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain Named in the body of this chapter. The chapter on the adolescent reorganisation of the brain is the part that most often shifts a parent’s reading of the eye-roll in the car from personal insult to developmental fact.