When Your Child Is Working Out Who They Are

One Sunday evening, a mother is halfway through loading the dishwasher when her thirteen-year-old comes down for a glass of water. The child stays at the counter for longer than a glass of water takes, and then says something their mother wasn’t ready for. It’s about who the child is, or might be, or has been working out they might be, and the mother realises there and then that she doesn’t have the words she would have liked.

She says something brief and warm and probably awkward, and hugs the child, who goes back upstairs. Then she stands for a long time with the dishwasher door still open, unsure what was being asked of her, what to do tomorrow, who to talk to, or what, if anything, she’s supposed to do next.

Some version of this comes up often in our work with parents. What the child says varies: sometimes it’s about sexuality, sometimes about gender, and sometimes it’s a broader question about identity, about not fitting what the family had assumed. What doesn’t vary is how stirred up the parent feels, and how much turns on what the parent does next.