Silence is Golden
Notice how the father in this story sincerely empathized with his daughter and, without pressing her or making her feel guilty, reflected her desire to not communicate.
A year or so ago, my daughter, Nell, and I had fallen into a troubling routine.
She would come home after school and I would ask her how she was doing and she would say, “Fine.” That was it. I could only get one or two words out of her. It had become a daily routine of non-communication. By asking her questions each day when she got home it seemed like I was only exacerbating the tension.
I remembered reading once that one way to deal with someone who does not want to communicate is to break the routine. So one day when Nell came home I asked her how she was doing. When she gave me the standard one-word response before heading to her bedroom, I said, “You don’t want to talk to me, do you?”
She stopped instantly, gave me a strange look, and said, “No,” and went to her room. That was the end of it, but I knew I had touched her feelings.
The next day, I repeated the new routine. This time when I said she didn’t want to talk to me, Nell said, “Not right now, Dad.” This went on for a few days before slowly, and on her terms, Nell began talking more to me. Then one day I was sitting at the kitchen table thinking about something, in a sort of trance, while she was doing the dishes. I was quiet, not talking to her even though she was just a few feet away, and it must have bothered her that I wasn’t asking her questions as usual. All of a sudden she started talking about her day and she brought me out of my trance. It struck me that suddenly she was sharing her feelings with me, and it was so wonderful I got tears in my eyes.
Sometimes I think the most valuable tool for communication with teenagers is silence.
What would happen if you went into a forest to hunt and began by firing shots into the air? That’s often what asking questions is like; sometimes questions are so autobiographical and controlling that people simply don’t want to talk about their deeper or most vulnerable issues. The key is to go in the forest and be quiet; then animals will begin to appear.
Teens want to talk—they really do. They want to open up, but they want to feel that it is safe. They want to do it on their own terms and in their time, and parents must simply have the patience to allow this—to be present, to be available, to be accessible, and to be quiet. We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them accordingly. Interestingly, the ears never close, but the mouth can.
The way the father in the story treated his daughter was what I would consider a deposit into her Relationship Bank Account. Let me explain what that means...
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