When They Stop Talking to You

The change is rarely dramatic. There’s no fight, no slammed door, no moment you can point to and say that is when it changed. Instead, one day in October, you realise that the after-school conversation, which used to be the one part of the day you could count on, has been single syllables for about three weeks. How was it? Fine. Her phone is out before her coat is off, and she’s upstairs before you’ve put the shopping down.

As you stand in the hall with the bags, it dawns on you that the child who, eighteen months ago, wouldn’t stop talking about her day has become a teenager who tells you nothing.

This is one of the most disorienting changes in parenting, and parents going through it tend to assume they’re the only ones. In fact it happens to more or less every parent of a thirteen-year-old. It’s disorienting because you have been the most important person in someone’s life, and now you’re watching yourself being demoted, in real time.

What is actually happening

In the great majority of cases, a teenager who stops talking to her parents is doing exactly what this stage of development asks of her. Among other things, adolescence is about building a self that isn’t a smaller version of her parents. To do that, she needs an inner life that she doesn’t report, at every turn, to the adults who raised her. Keeping things to herself is how she builds it.

There are good developmental reasons for this. The teenage brain is reorganising, and her friends’ reactions are becoming the main way she judges herself. The opinions that count most now belong to the four other fourteen-year-olds in the WhatsApp group, not to the mother who still asks whether she has done her homework. She hasn’t stopped loving her mother. She is holding her thoughts back because she is testing what it’s like to have thoughts that are her own.

The conversations that do still happen are the ones she has chosen: the things she has decided, on some level, to share with you. That’s more intimate than an eight-year-old’s chatter, even though it looks like less.

There’s also an indignity in this that parents rarely say out loud. The person you have given fourteen years of your attention to now finds your questions tedious and your presence mildly embarrassing. You aren’t imagining the eye-roll: it’s real, it’s aimed at you, and you got it for asking how her day was. Parents who pretend it doesn’t sting are often the ones who end up snapping three days later. It’s better to admit that it hurts. The indignity is part of having a teenager.

When the silence is something else

Most of the time, the silence is part of normal development. Sometimes it’s more than that, and you’re right to ask: is this normal, or is something happening? There’s no clean test, and we would distrust anyone who offered one. But there are signs we look for in clinical practice, and you can look for them too.

A teenager who is withdrawing as part of normal development is usually withdrawing from her parents in particular. She’s still talking to her friends, still on the phone in her room and still going out on Saturdays. Her friendship group is intact, or changing in the way friendship groups change at fourteen. She is still, broadly, getting on with school. Her sleep is wrong, as teenage sleep is, but it’s wrong in the recognisable way: late to bed, hard to wake, sleeping the weekend off.

A teenager whose silence is part of something bigger is often withdrawing from her friends as well. Her phone is less busy, not more. The Saturday plans have stopped. There used to be music behind her bedroom door, and now there’s nothing. Her appetite has changed. Her mood is flat in a way that doesn’t lift when something good happens.

The second pattern is the one to take seriously, without panicking. No single sign separates a teenager going through adolescence from one who is struggling. What separates them is how the signs build up, how long they last, and your own sense, which is usually accurate, that something is off.

If this second pattern sounds like your child, don’t corner her. Make any kind of conversation as easy to start as you can, and at the same time begin thinking 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

When a teenager goes silent, the instinct is to ask more questions, to organise a sit-down, or to say, with the best of intentions, “We used to be so close. What’s changed?” We’d ask you not to do any of these things.

For a teenager, a sit-down conversation is almost unbearable. It puts her in the spotlight just when she is trying to step out of it, and it tells her you’ve decided her silence is a problem to be solved, which makes her the problem.

Saying we used to be so close is worse. However lovingly you mean it, you are asking her to repair your grief. She can’t, because 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 asking for something she can’t give, and she will withdraw further.

Finally, interrogating her never gets you what you’re after. “Are you all right? Are you sure? You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” She’ll say yes and mean nothing by it. The information you want won’t come from asking her straight out, so you need to keep a less direct way open.

There’s one moment worth describing, because almost every parent gets it wrong: the minute she walks in after school. You’ve been thinking about her all afternoon, so you open with “How was it? Did you see Maya? What did you have for lunch?” She has spent seven hours managing how she comes across to everyone at school, and she has nothing left for questions at the front door. She gives you one syllable and goes upstairs, and the rejection makes your question the next afternoon a little sharper. What works, almost embarrassingly, is to say nothing beyond hello. Smile, and go back to whatever you were doing. Slowly, the room you’re in becomes somewhere she comes back into, and stops being somewhere she escapes from.

What does work

The way in is through something you do together that isn’t about the conversation: a drive, a dog walk, a trip to the supermarket, or the late-night visit to the kitchen when she has come down for a snack. These are the conversations teenagers actually have with their parents. Doing something together gives her the dignity of not being looked at while she talks, and gives you something to do with your face while you listen, which is harder than it sounds.

One thing that works is a question that doesn’t sound like one: “I was wondering whether Maya has been around much this term.” Say it when you’re side by side, with neither of you looking at the other, and then don’t fill the silence. She’ll answer or she won’t. If she doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing, and you’ve raised the subject. The mistake is to ask the same thing with a question mark and an expectant face, which turns it into an interview.

Parents take a silent supper harder than they need to. A teenager with nothing to say at supper is using the meal to refuel; she isn’t punishing the family. Leave the silence alone. Talk to your partner about the rest of the day, let the radio do some of the talking, and keep your eyes on your own plate. After three or four suppers like this, she will say something. It won’t be at this one. It will be at the fourth. More gets said in passing, while a teenager stands at the counter eating, than in any planned conversation, so sometimes just be the parent making a cup of tea when she walks in, and ask whether she wants one.

Parents tend to overdo it when their teenager has a friend round. Treat the friend as a guest: say hello and help yourselves to anything in the fridge, then leave them to it. Your teenager wants to be seen having a friend; she doesn’t want the friend interrogated.

The phrase we find ourselves using is presence without demand: being in the room, on the sofa or just nearby, without needing her to do anything with you. It can feel like doing nothing, but being available without intruding is more or less the whole of a parent’s job in the teenage years.

For parents of girls at this stage, the book we keep recommending is Lisa Damour’s Untangled, which sets out the seven strands of adolescent development without reducing them to slogans. For the neuroscience behind all this, Daniel Siegel’s Brainstorm is the clearest writing for a general reader we’ve come across. The chapter on how the brain reorganises in adolescence is the part that helps most, because once you’ve read it, you can see the eye-roll 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

This kind of withdrawal happens almost entirely in the pre-teen and teenage years, and your part in it changes noticeably over that time. The bands below are a rough guide: some children begin to pull back at ten, and others not until fourteen. The pattern tells you more than her age does.

If your child is between nine and eleven. In most families, this is where the first withdrawal happens. The self-consciousness that comes just before secondary school is arriving: she has realised that she doesn’t have to report everything she thinks to you, and conversation at supper has started to thin. This is the smaller step back that comes before the silence of adolescence proper. At this age, resist the urge to treat the thinning as a problem to fix. Keep up the after-school routine, ask less, not more, and notice the conversations that do still happen, which are often at bedtime or on the way somewhere, and let them run as long as they want to.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. This chapter is mostly written for this age group. Her friendships have reorganised, WhatsApp is now where her social life happens, and she no longer wants to go over her day with you when she gets home. The approach is the one set out above: presence without demand, talking while you do something else, and a home she can come back into without being interviewed. The single most useful thing at this age is to say very little when she comes in. When she walks through the door after school, say hello, smile and go back to whatever you were doing. Save the questions for later, and most of them for never.

If your child is mid-teen, thirteen to sixteen. By now silence is the norm, and the conversations that do still happen are more and more the ones she chooses. Your part is to make those easier to have. They might come on the way back from a friend’s house late in the evening, or when she comes down for a snack and stays for forty minutes because you’ve stopped asking and started listening. If what you’re seeing warrants it, talk to her as one adult to another. Ask her once whether she’d like to see a counsellor of her own, tell her you’d help her find one, and then leave the offer open 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. At this age the silence is often a sign of something different from the withdrawal of fourteen: in some sense, she has already gone. More and more of her life is outside the house, the friendships she has now are the ones she will take with her, and her inner life is being put together in places you aren’t invited into. While she’s still living with you, work out with her the new, adult terms of your relationship. When she does talk to you, treat it as part of her adult life. Ask her opinion on things and listen to the answer. At this age you’re moving, slowly, from being her parent to being one of the adults in her life.

If your child is eighteen and beyond. The silence has a different cause now. She calls less because she’s busy living the life you have spent eighteen years preparing her for. Your job now is restraint. Answer when she calls, and leave the calling to her. Send messages that don’t need a reply. When she’s home for a weekend, resist the urge to make up for three months of conversation in two days. The long conversations she’ll have with you at twenty-five will come because the visits at nineteen were easy.

The longer arc

No one tells you, in the middle of this, how much you miss the relationship as it was: the eight-year-old who told you dinosaur facts, or the eleven-year-old who came and sat on the end of your bed the night before she started secondary school because she couldn’t sleep. Those children are still there in the teenager you have now, but for now you can’t reach them, and the grief is real.

The relationship that comes back in her early twenties is a new one, between two adults, and it often has more in it than the old one did. There’s no good way through the teenage years that doesn’t involve sitting out the silence and keeping the door open, day after day, without making an issue of it.

She won’t thank you for it, this year or next. But in eight years’ time, on a visit home, she may sit down with you and tell you, without any preamble, something you had no idea she’d been going through. If she does, it will be because the door was open.

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 We mention this book earlier in the chapter. It’s the book we give parents of teenage girls more than any other, and its seven-strand framework is the clearest writing we know on what your teenager is actually doing when she goes silent.

Daniel J. Siegel, Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain We mention this book earlier in the chapter. Its chapter on how the brain reorganises in adolescence is the part that most often changes how parents read the eye-roll, from a personal insult to a normal part of development.