When your teenager stops talking to you

It rarely happens in one go. There is no announcement. There is just a slow narrowing, from conversations to answers, from answers to single words, until you realise you are getting most of your information about your own child from the length of their pauses.

Parents usually read this as rejection, or as evidence they have done something wrong. It is almost always neither.

Silence is a strategy

Teenagers go quiet for reasons that make sense from where they are standing. Working out which one is in play changes what you should do about it.

• Protecting you. If they think the truth will worry you, upset you, or start something, silence is the considerate option. This is much more common than parents realise.
• Protecting themselves. If previous honesty led to a consequence, a lecture, or a long conversation they could not escape, they have learned what talking costs.
• Not knowing. Sometimes there is genuinely no sentence yet. Being asked to explain a feeling you cannot name is unpleasant at any age.
• Ordinary separation. Some of it is the normal, healthy business of becoming a separate person. Not everything is a symptom.

Why pushing makes it quieter

The natural response to a closing door is to push on it. More questions, more direct questions, at the end of the day when you finally have them cornered in the kitchen.

From their side this is an interrogation, and the reasonable defence against an interrogation is to give less. So you push harder. This is the same pursue and withdraw pattern that couples get into, and it runs on exactly the same fuel.

What tends to work better

Sideways beats face on. Conversations go better when nobody has to make eye contact. Driving, cooking, walking the dog, standing at a barbecue. The absence of pressure to perform is what does the work.

Availability without demand. Being consistently around, without a question attached, is more effective than any single well designed conversation. Teenagers tend to open up at inconvenient moments, on their timetable, and mostly to whoever happens to be present.

Comment rather than interrogate. You seem flat this week is a door. What is wrong with you lately is a wall. One can be ignored without cost, which is precisely why it is easier to answer.

Take small offers seriously. When something does get said, the temptation is to seize it and solve it. Resist. Over reacting to a small disclosure teaches them exactly what a bigger one would cost.

Separate behaviour from connection. Boundaries still matter and you can still hold them. Just try not to run the discipline conversation and the connection conversation in the same ten minutes.

When it is more than normal

Ordinary teenage privacy tends to be selective. They are quiet with you and perfectly animated with friends. Worth paying closer attention when the withdrawal is total: friends dropping away, things they used to love abandoned, sleep and appetite changing, school refusal, anger arriving as the only available setting, or anything suggesting they are not safe.

If you are worried about their safety, ask directly. Asking a young person whether they are thinking about suicide does not plant the idea. It is one of the most protective things you can do. In an emergency call 111. To talk it through, including if you are the worried parent rather than the young person, call or text 1737 at any hour.

If they will not come to counselling

Very common, and not the end of it. Parent only sessions are often the most useful work available, because how you respond to a closed door genuinely changes what happens next, and that is workable whether or not your child has any interest in changing anything.

Where a teenager does come, I am straight with them at the start about what is confidential and what is not. Within the limits of safety, what they tell me stays with them. Parents sometimes find that uncomfortable. It is also the thing that makes the work possible.

Family and teen counselling is available in Takapuna and online across New Zealand.