The Conversations Parents Avoid

A mother has been standing at the sink for a long time, washing one mug. She has known for about ten days, since the diagnosis, that she has to talk to the children. They are eight and twelve, and they have noticed that the adults are behaving a little differently and that phone calls are now taken out in the garden. The eight-year-old has asked twice whether everything is alright. Each time, her mother has said yes.

She doesn’t know how to begin. She rehearsed it on the way back from the school run, and late last night she Googled the right words to use with an eight-year-old. None of the websites had them. The mug in her hand is now perfectly clean.

We meet a lot of parents at exactly this point. The subject varies: sometimes it’s a diagnosis, sometimes a divorce, sometimes a death that has happened or one that is coming. Sometimes it’s the loss of a job or a house move. Sometimes it’s a question the parent has been hoping not to have to answer this week, about where babies come from or about the war on the television. Whatever the subject, the hard part is the same: starting.

This chapter is about the skill all those conversations share: being the adult who, when the moment comes, opens her mouth and says it, and doesn’t wash the mug for another ten minutes. Nobody is born with that skill, and it takes more than honesty. It’s a craft you learn with practice: letting the truth into a child’s life in a way she can manage.

What is actually happening

The instinct to protect a child from a hard truth comes out in familiar phrases: they’re too young, let them be children. Behind them is something else. Saying it out loud will make it more real for you, and you aren’t ready yet for it to be more real.

In most cases, the protective line (she’s too young to understand) is half true and half evasion. A four-year-old can’t follow the details of a stage-two cancer diagnosis. She can understand “mummy’s poorly and the doctors are looking after her, and the people who love us are going to help with school pickups for a while”. There are options between saying nothing and telling her everything. What you need to work out is how much of the truth she can take in at her age.

The other half is the protection you’re offering yourself. To say it, you have to have accepted it, and part of the reason you keep putting it off is that you haven’t yet had the conversation with yourself. Once you see that, the delay gets shorter.

Most parents don’t see what a long silence costs. When something is wrong in a family and nobody is saying so, a child notices. She also notices that the adults have decided not to talk about it, and she starts to build her own story. In nearly every case her story is worse than the truth, because she is building it alone, with only an eight-year-old’s imagination to work with. An eight-year-old who isn’t told that her grandmother is dying often thinks her grandmother is angry with her. A twelve-year-old who isn’t told about the family’s finances often thinks her parents have decided not to love each other any more.

Drip, drip rather than the big sit-down

Most people picture a difficult conversation as a family meeting at the kitchen table: everyone sitting down, a clearing of the throat, an announcement. In our experience this is almost never the right way to do it. A big sit-down turns the children into an audience, and the formality tells them, before anyone has said a word, that this is news they would rather not hear. By the time you begin, they’re already braced.

What works is what we call drip, drip. You break the conversation into smaller pieces and spread them out over days. Each one happens somewhere low-key, while her hands are busy and neither of you has to keep up eye contact. The first drip is the opening: “I want to tell you something about Granny. The doctors have said she’s very poorly.” You might say it in the car on the way to swimming, with both of you looking at the road. Then she’ll say something, usually a startlingly specific question: “Will she still come for Christmas.” Answer briefly and let it rest. The next drip comes two days later, in the bath, when she asks out of nowhere, is Granny going to die. You say the true sentence you’ve prepared: “We don’t know for sure, but we think probably yes. We have a bit of time.” Then stay in the bathroom for a few more minutes, in case she has another question.

Doing it this way lets her set the pace, and she never has to take it all in during a single hour, which would be more than she could cope with. Bath time still happens, and so does swimming, and she learns that hard truths can be part of everyday life. That in itself is one of the most important things these conversations teach her.

Figure

Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read is the book we keep giving parents at this point. Her chapter on what we pass on through our silences and the ways we change the subject is the clearest writing we know on why a hard conversation matters for much longer than the moment itself.

When the topic is death

Death is the conversation parents avoid most often. The single most useful rule, when you tell a child that someone has died or is going to die, is to use the words dead, died and dying. Don’t say passed away or gone to sleep. Don’t say we have lost Granny either, which a small child will sometimes take literally, asking where she has been mislaid. Euphemisms like these protect the adult. The child needs the plain words.

How you build the sentence matters as much as the words: “Granny’s body has stopped working. She isn’t going to get better. She’s going to die soon, and after that she won’t come back, but we’ll be able to talk about her and remember her.” Keep it short and concrete. After a sentence like that she will have a question, and it will almost never be the one you prepared for. Answer it briefly and plainly, in language she can manage.

Child Bereavement UK, which Winston’s Wish is now part of, covers this better than any other UK source we know. Its materials on telling a child that someone has died are the clearest single guide in the country, and they go on to cover the death of a baby or a parent, and a whole family grieving at once. Its Helpline is 0800 02 888 40, free, Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm, excluding bank holidays.

The other hard conversations, briefly

These need more than this chapter can give them, so what follows is brief.

Separation and divorce. Another chapter in this volume covers this in detail. The principles here still apply: drip, drip; truthful, in that you don’t lie; and edited, in that you don’t hand the adults’ grief to the child.

Diagnosis in the family. Use a short, true sentence pitched at her age, and say it again over the days that follow. “Mummy has been told she has cancer. The doctors are going to give her medicine that will make her tired and lose some hair for a while. They are working hard to help her get better.” Avoid don’t worry. Children hear it as an instruction they can’t follow.

Job loss, money trouble, the change of house. Children pick up on stress at home, and what they imagine is worse than what you would tell them. “Dad has finished the job he was doing, and we’re working out what comes next. It may mean a few changes in the next few months. We’re going to be alright.” The reassurance tells her that you’re coping, and that’s what she’s really asking about.

Mental health in the family. A parent whose own mental health affects the mood at home often goes years without mentioning it. What helps is to name it briefly, make clear it isn’t because of her, and tell her where you’re getting help: “Sometimes I get sad in a way that’s bigger than is helpful. It isn’t because of you. I’m seeing my own counsellor.” Hearing it named is a relief to her. If you want more, the Mental Health Foundation’s resources for families are the right place to look.

Where babies come from, and the more general fact of sex. This needs a piece of work of its own, but the same principles apply. Family Lives have practical material, usefully divided by age.

The news, and the world’s awfulness. Pretending the news hasn’t happened rarely helps. What does help is putting it in your own family’s words: “That’s a difficult thing happening in the world. Lots of grown-ups are working to help. We’re safe here.”

What not to do

A few things to avoid:

Don’t call a big sit-down with both parents present and make a formal announcement. The setting tells her something serious is coming before anyone has said a word.

Try not to have the conversation while you’re in tears you can’t control. Children take their cue from how the adult is coping, and a parent in pieces is asking the child to take on the parent’s distress as well as the news. Some emotion is useful; a full collapse isn’t. If you can’t say the sentence without falling apart, wait an hour, then come back. If you need to talk to someone about the conversation before you have it, Family Lives’ confidential helpline is the right line to ring.

Don’t promise that everything will be alright when you don’t know that it will. A reassurance you can’t guarantee will be proved wrong eventually. It’s better to say: “I don’t know exactly how this is going to go, but we’re going to handle it together, and I’m going to keep telling you what’s going on.” You can keep a promise about how you’ll deal with things. A promise about how they’ll turn out is one you often can’t keep.

Don’t keep putting it off. If you’ve been meaning to have the conversation for three months, she has spent that time sensing something she doesn’t understand. The delay usually makes it harder, because by then she has made up her own story to fill the gap, and when you do tell her, you have to replace that story as well as give her the news.

And don’t have the conversation in front of other children who aren’t old enough for it yet. Your four-year-old doesn’t need the version you’re telling your eleven-year-old. If your children are at different stages, tell each of them at her own level and in her own time.

At different ages

The same conversation goes very differently at five, nine, thirteen and seventeen. The bands below are a rough guide. What helps is pitching the conversation at the child in front of you, whatever the topic.

If your child is between four and seven. Use short, concrete sentences, and avoid metaphor. Tell her the truth at the level her vocabulary can manage, and repeat it over the next few days. A sentence that helps: “I’m going to tell you a little bit now, and we’ll talk about it more later.” The first sentence only opens the conversation. At this age magical thinking is in full force, and a four-year-old will often decide that something she did or didn’t do is to blame. Tell her in so many words that it isn’t: “This is not because of you.”

If your child is between seven and nine. Her thinking is concrete and getting sharper, and she wants details, accurate ones. Be willing to say “I don’t know” when you can’t answer a question; she’ll hear it as honesty, not failure. What works is a side-by-side conversation, where you’re both doing something else, you say it once, and you let the silence do the rest: “I’ve been thinking about how to tell you something. Granny is very poorly.” Then keep your eyes on what you’re doing.

If your child is between nine and eleven. She has reached the self-conscious stage that comes before secondary school. She may play down her reaction in front of you and deal with it somewhere else. Tell her plainly that she can come back to you about it: “I’ve told you this once. There will be more questions, and you can ask them whenever they come.” Then leave the door open, and don’t check on her too often.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. She can think like an adult, but she doesn’t yet have an adult’s ways of coping with feelings. Talk to her almost as an adult, and expect a young teenager’s response. She may be furious, or flat, or composed in front of you and overwhelmed when she’s on her own. Trust that she’s responding, even when you can’t see it. “I know this is a lot. I’m here when you want to talk. We’re going to keep checking in.”

If your child is between thirteen and sixteen. She’s working out who she is, and this conversation comes just as she’s becoming a person separate from you. She may be more affected than she shows, and her friends may see more of her reaction than you do. Give her the information, don’t push for the conversation, and keep the door open: “I want you to know what’s going on. You don’t have to talk about it now.” Then let her come back to it late that night, when she wanders downstairs for a glass of water.

If your child is sixteen and beyond. She’s on her way to leaving home, and your conversations are becoming adult-to-adult. Be willing to be more honest about how you are, without making her your confidante: “I’m finding this very hard. I’m also going to be alright. I wanted you to know.” Admitting that it’s hard for you, in an edited form, is often what stops the conversation feeling like a performance.

The longer arc

In the long run, the conversations you’re dreading are the ones your child will remember as the times she was treated as a real person. It’s tempting to believe that silence keeps childhood intact. What she gets from being trusted with as much of the truth as she can manage is the experience of being respected. A child who is told things, and knows she can come back to them, grows up to be an adult who tells her own children things. A child who isn’t told is the adult who comes to see us twenty years later, working out, with some sadness, what was happening in her own house in the years nobody told her. Not every detail belongs with a child. Working out which ones do is your job, and you can do it slowly.

You aren’t going to get this conversation perfect tonight. Say what you can manage, and come back tomorrow with the next sentence. It will happen as a series of moments spread over the next several weeks. By Friday, you’re aiming for a household where what’s happening is out in the open, pitched at each child’s age, and something any of them can come back to whenever they need.

By now the mug is clean. Put it down, and go and find the eight-year-old, who is on the sofa with the cat. Sit down next to her and say the short first sentence. Let her ask her question, and answer it briefly. You’ll come back to it on the way to swimming, again at bedtime and again on Sunday. Once you’ve opened the subject it stays open, and she’ll do most of the coming back to it. Your job is to keep being there when she does.

NOTES

1. 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.
2. Faber, Adele & Mazlish, Elaine. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. Avon, 1980. The acknowledge-feelings frame and the practical language for the moments parenting actually happens.

Where to go further

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) The book we mention earlier in this chapter. It’s the clearest writing we know on what we pass on through our silences and the ways we change the subject, and on why a hard conversation matters for much longer than the moment itself.

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk The classic on how to build a conversation between a parent and a child that actually works. It’s forty years old, and the skill it teaches, sentence by sentence, is what the drip-drip conversation in this chapter needs.