When Your Child Is Working Out Who They Are

The mother is in the kitchen on a Sunday evening with the dishwasher half-loaded and her thirteen-year-old, who has come downstairs in pyjamas and bare feet for a glass of water. The thirteen-year-old has stood at the counter for a moment longer than the glass of water requires. She has, then, said a sentence the mother has not been ready for. The sentence is about who the child is, or might be, or has been working out she might be, and the mother has registered, in the moment, that she does not have the script she would have liked.

She says something brief and warm and probably awkward. She hugs the child. The child goes back upstairs. The mother stands at the counter for a long time, with the door of the dishwasher still open, and notices that she is not sure what the sentence asked of her, what to do tomorrow, who to talk to, or what, if anything, she is supposed to do next.

In our work, parents arrive at some version of this Sunday often. The sentence varies. It is sometimes about sexuality. It is sometimes about gender. It is sometimes a broader question about identity, about not fitting the shape the family had assumed. What does not vary is the parent’s activation, and how much turns on what the parent does next.

This chapter is about the parent’s stance rather than the question itself. The working out is the child’s. The parent’s job is to be the kind of parent around whom the child can do it safely.

What is actually happening

A child working out who she is is engaged in the central project of adolescence, which begins earlier and goes on later than the cultural script suggests. The four-year-old playing with what she likes to be called is doing a version. The thirteen-year-old at the dishwasher is doing a version. The seventeen-year-old, in some respects all of us, are doing versions across a lifetime.

The parent’s instinct is often to want the question resolved. The instinct is understandable. It is also, in this work, almost always the wrong instinct. Identity in childhood and adolescence is not a question with an answer to receive but a long, often non-linear process, and the parent’s job is to be, in the daily textures of life, the calm reliable adult she can return to whenever she needs.

You do not need to know what to do. Listen, hold steady, keep loving, and do not take the question off her by pretending to have a clearer view of it than she does. The child whose parent races to a conclusion, in either direction, has been told, without anyone meaning to, that the working-out is not allowed to be slow.

The cultural conversation around these topics has become unusually loud and polarised, and parents arrive at the kitchen counter with more noise in their heads than the situation warrants. The first move is often to turn the volume down.

The volume in your own head

A parent reading this is also a parent who has been reading the news. The cultural debates around sexuality and particularly around gender in young people are loud, contested, and changing. Reasonable people, working in good faith, hold very different views, and the clinical landscape for gender-questioning young people specifically is, at the time of writing, in active reorganisation in the UK. The Cass Review and the NHS England Gender Service for Children have set out a framework that current NHS practice operates within; the debates around that framework continue in public.

The Parent Book is not the publication that resolves those debates, and it is not the publication that takes a position on them. What we can say, as counsellors writing to a parent, is what is true at the level of the child in front of you: she is your child, she is working something out, and the question she has asked is not one whose answer you owe to the public conversation. The answer, in the short term, is the family she is standing in.

The practical implication, for the parent at the dishwasher, is to lower the volume of the public conversation inside her own head before responding to her own child. She is not asking the question the internet is having; she is asking her question, in her family, with her specific history.

Where the noise has become unmanageable, your own counsellor is the right route. The BACP and NCPS directories list counsellors working with parents on family and identity questions. Talking it through with someone whose job is to listen rather than persuade is one of the most useful things a parent in this position can do.

What helps in the first conversation

The opening sentence the parent has just given, awkward or not, has already done the most important thing it could do: registered the disclosure without rejecting it. The child has, in saying anything at all, taken a risk. The first job of the first response is not to be brilliant. It is to be safe.

What helps next is the absence of the interrogation. Children, and especially adolescents, do not disclose in finished sentences. They disclose in pieces, distributed across days and weeks, often in low-key locations with their hands occupied. The first sentence is rarely the full picture; it is the door opening. The parent who races to the second and third question, “how long have you known, are you sure, what about”, has put the child in the position of having to explain herself. The child who has to explain herself has, often, stopped talking.

The form that helps is the form the conversations-parents-avoid chapter calls drip, drip. The first response is brief and warm. “Thank you for telling me. I love you. We can talk about this whenever you want.” Then the conversation rests. The next drip happens days later, in the car or on the walk to the corner shop. “I have been thinking about what you told me on Sunday. I am still here. Tell me whatever you want me to know.” Then the silence does the rest. The child decides how much to say next.

What also helps: continuing to be the parent in all the other ways the child is used to. The school run. The supper. The weekend rhythm. A child who has named something for the first time and finds that the rest of family life carries on as it always did has been told, without anyone saying so, that what she has named is not the largest thing in the room. Her parent loves her. The dog still needs walking. The world has not, on her account, ended.

What is rarely useful: the immediate sit-down family meeting, the announcement to the wider family, the rapid sharing with friends. The child has told you something. She has not, by telling you, given you permission to tell anyone else. Ask her, gently, what she wants other people in the family to know and when. “I am not going to talk to anyone about what you told me unless you want me to. Tell me when you are ready.” That sentence, said early, is one of the largest gifts the parent can give.

What does not help

The sentences that most often close the conversation, gathered from parents who have, with the best intentions, used them.

Are you sure. The child has, by saying anything at all, told you she has been thinking about this for longer than this conversation. Are you sure asks her, in effect, to prove herself, which is the inverse of what the moment is asking for.

It is just a phase. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, the sentence is not the parent’s to predict, and using it as reassurance teaches the child that the alternative would have been unacceptable.

“Have you been on the internet.” The cultural conversation about social contagion is one parents have read about. In the kitchen on a Sunday, the question arrives as an accusation: my parent thinks I am imitating something. The parent loses access to the conversation.

Do not tell anyone yet. This can be wise; it can also be heard as shame. If the conversation is about timing, the sentence is “I want to make sure you decide who knows, and when, and that I follow your lead.” That is different.

“I always knew.” The child needs the moment to be hers, not a confirmation of something the parent thinks she has already privately known.

“Whatever you are, I love you.” Closer to useful, but the whatever telegraphs that the child has named a category-question. The cleaner sentence is “I love you, and I am here for you whatever you are working out”. The first is conditional in a way the parent did not mean. The second is not.

The voice that helps, more than the specific words, conveys: I have heard you. I am not panicking. I love you. We will work this out together. That voice grows out of the parent having lowered the noise in her own head, and out of the long history of trust the family has been building since she was small.

The school, the GP, and the route through professional help

Where a parent is unsure what to do next, or the child is struggling beyond what the parent can manage alone, the established UK professional pathways are the right place to go. They are also, in our experience, where the most consistent, least politicised, and most calmly clinical support is to be found.

The school is the first partner. The pastoral lead or form tutor knows the child’s day and the social weather around her, and is, in most UK schools, well-placed to support a young person through identity-related questions with discretion and care. The Designated Safeguarding Lead is the right adult to bring in if you have any concerns of a safeguarding kind: bullying, online contact that worries you, sustained distress. Raising a concern with the DSL is not handing her over; it is bringing another professional adult into her support.

The GP is the gateway to NHS clinical routes. CAMHS is the route for any sustained mental-health concern. The GP can also advise on local services and, where the child’s question is in territory where specialist NHS routes apply, the relevant clinical pathway. NHS guidance is updated as the picture evolves; the GP, working within current NHS frameworks, is the right person to advise on what is available now.

For longer-arc family support, the Anna Freud Centre’s family-wellbeing resources are calm, clinically authoritative and parent-readable, and their work on adolescent development is among the best UK-anchored material we know. Family Lives’ confidential helpline at 0808 800 2222 is the right line for the parent who needs to talk something through. NHS Every Mind Matters carries general young-person mental-health resources that cover the wider parental layer.

Where the family would benefit from family therapy, the BACP and NCPS therapist directories are the route. Both bodies hold their members to ethical frameworks that require working within competence and following current clinical guidance. The right counsellor is one who works within the established UK ethical frameworks, takes the child’s pace, and does not, in either direction, take political positions on contested aspects of the field. Where you are unsure, your GP can advise.

At different ages

Identity work looks different at four, at nine, at thirteen, and at seventeen. The bands below are descriptions, not boxes; children develop unevenly, and a child’s question may surface earlier or later than the band suggests.

If your child is between four and seven. Young children explore identity in play. Dressing-up, role-taking, trying on names, declaring on a Tuesday that she is a dog and on a Wednesday that she is a fairy, are part of the ordinary development of this age. Take her seriously without making it heavy. “That sounds fun. Tell me about it.” The categories are fluid for children this young in ways they will not be later. Be warm, curious, unsurprised; do not layer adult anxiety onto play that is, for the child, exactly what play is. Where expression of identity is sustained and causing distress at home or at school, the GP is the right early conversation: the gateway to current NHS advice for a child this young.

If your child is between seven and nine. The child is becoming more aware of social categories. She may ask questions about families, about same-sex couples she has seen, about what boy and girl mean, about why she likes or does not like the things her peers do. Give honest, age-appropriate answers, briefly and calmly. Some families have two mums. Some have two dads. Some have one. Some have a mum and a dad. Then back to whatever the kitchen was doing. The school’s PSHE will be running its own version of this; ask the class teacher what has been covered.

If your child is between nine and eleven. Pre-secondary self-consciousness arrives, and with it more conscious questions about sexuality and identity. Some children name something to a parent in this band; many do not. What matters is the household in which these conversations are possible, not the conversation itself. Other people’s identities mentioned warmly in passing. Books on the shelf that include a wide range of families and lives. If your child does name something, the form of the first conversation matters more than the words: thank her, love her, do not interrogate, follow her pace.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. Peer-group identity work intensifies. Many young people in this band are beginning to think more consciously about who they are, including in territory of sexuality and gender. Some name things to a parent; some only to peers; some only to themselves. The aim is a household she can come back to without performance. The car, the walk, the bedtime light off, are the venues. The school’s form tutor and pastoral lead are the right adults to know; the DSL where any safeguarding dimension is present. The GP is the route for any sustained distress.

If your child is in mid to late secondary, thirteen to sixteen. Identity work is now central to her developmental task. Some young people are clear about how they identify; others are working it out across years; both are within normal range. What she needs is presence without pressure. “I love you. I am here. Tell me what you want me to know, on your own schedule.” Where the picture includes mental-health difficulty, the GP is the gateway to CAMHS, and the school’s pastoral team is the right partner for the daily watch. The DSL where any safeguarding dimension is present.

If your child is sixteen and beyond. Conversations are increasingly adult-to-adult. She will, in many cases, be doing significant identity work in spaces you are not in. The parent’s job is to be the household she still wants to come back into, on her own terms. The BACP and NCPS directories are the route if she would benefit from her own counsellor; the GP for clinical questions; Kooth, the NHS-commissioned online platform for young people in many areas, for the young person who will not, at sixteen, talk to anyone she has met.

Your own work

The parent reading this chapter may be a parent whose own family of origin did not manage these conversations well. The script she grew up with may have been narrower, harder, more silent than the one she now wants to offer her own child. Offering a different script from the one she inherited is real, unglamorous work, and sometimes more than a parent can do without help.

Your own counsellor is, in this picture, a piece of the infrastructure. Talking it through with someone whose job is to listen, in a confidential setting, lowers the volume in your own head. Family Lives is the right line if you do not yet have a counsellor and need to talk.

A note on the other parent, where there is one, and on the wider family. Adults in the household will not, in many cases, hold the same view of how to respond. Agreeing the family’s stance is its own conversation, often a hard one, and one the child should not be present for. Have it between the adults, in a different room, with the door closed, ideally with a counsellor or a confidential helpline in support. What the child needs from the family is consistency. Getting there is your job, not hers.

The longer arc

A child’s identity does not resolve in one Sunday-evening conversation; it is worked out across a longer arc, often slow, often roundabout, often surprising. Most young people work this out gradually, in their own time, with the people around them, and arrive at adulthood with a sense of themselves that is theirs to know. The parent’s job, across that arc, is to be the household she is still able to come back to.

You are not, this Sunday, going to deliver the conversation perfectly. You are going to deliver the version you can manage, and come back tomorrow with the next sentence. You are going to lower the volume of the public argument in your own head. You are going to talk to your own counsellor, your own friend, your GP if that is helpful. You are going to be, across the months and years, the parent who has held the door open without standing in the doorway.

The mother at the dishwasher, who said something brief and warm and probably awkward, has already done the most important thing this chapter can ask of her. She did not, in that moment, close the door. She kept it open. Whatever comes next, in the longer arc, will come through that door. Your job is to be there when it does.

She will, in time, be who she is. Yours is to love her through the working out.

NOTES

1. Damour, Lisa. The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Ballantine, 2023. The emotional task of adolescence: feeling everything intensely without dysregulation.
2. Perry, Philippa. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Penguin Life, 2019. Perry’s account of the rupture-and-repair cycle and of catching ourselves in our own reactivity.

Where to go further

Lisa Damour, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents A calm, evidence-anchored book on what adolescent emotion actually is and how a parent stays useful to it. The right read for parents looking for something carefully clinical that does not take positions on the louder cultural debates.

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) The cleanest UK writing we know on what a parent transmits without meaning to. In a kitchen where a child has named something the parent is still working out her own response to, it is the book that helps the parent stay the parent.