There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles into a home when a child decides their parent is no longer a safe place to land. It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no door slamming, no dramatic declaration.
One day you simply realize that the kid who used to narrate every thought, every playground drama, every wild dream about becoming an astronaut-veterinarian has become someone who answers your questions with shrugs and single syllables.
If you’re living in that quiet right now, I want you to know something. This didn’t happen because your child hit some magical age where they naturally pulled away. Yes, adolescence brings independence. But the wall between you? That was likely built brick by brick, in moments so small you probably don’t even remember them.
And here’s the hard truth: you were probably holding the trowel.
1) The time you laughed at something they took seriously
Kids say ridiculous things. That’s part of their charm. But somewhere between ages eight and twelve, they start saying things that feel ridiculous to us but are deadly serious to them. Maybe it was a fear that seemed irrational. Maybe it was a crush on someone you found amusing. Maybe it was a dream that seemed impractical.
And you laughed. Not cruelly. Probably affectionately, even. But you laughed.
To you, it was a fleeting moment of levity. To them, it was a data point. They learned that bringing their inner world to you might result in feeling small. As noted by research from the Gottman Institute, it takes roughly five positive interactions to repair the damage of one negative one.
That single laugh might have needed five moments of genuine listening to undo. Did those moments happen? Most of us can’t say for certain.
The thing about children is they rarely tell you when you’ve hurt them in these small ways. They just quietly adjust their expectations of you.
2) The time you were distracted during their big moment
I’ve watched my own grandchildren perform in school plays, score goals, and proudly present art projects that looked like abstract expressionism gone wrong. And I’ll confess there were times my mind wandered to grocery lists or that weird noise my car was making.
Kids are remarkably perceptive about where your attention actually lives. They know when you’re physically present but mentally elsewhere. They can feel it when your “that’s great, sweetheart” is automated rather than authentic.
The cruel irony is that these moments often happen during events we showed up for. We get credit for being there, but the child registers the absence within the presence. They stop expecting your full attention because they’ve learned it’s not reliably available. So they stop offering the vulnerable, excited parts of themselves that require it.
What makes this particularly painful is that you genuinely thought you were doing the right thing by showing up. And you were, partially. But presence without attention is a half-measure kids eventually stop accepting.
3) The time you turned their confession into a lecture
Remember when they came to you with something they’d done wrong? Maybe they cheated on a test. Maybe they said something mean to a friend. Maybe they broke something and hid it. They came to you carrying guilt, and what they needed was help processing that guilt.
What they got instead was a twenty-minute sermon on character, consequences, and how disappointed you were.
I understand the impulse. Believe me. When a child confesses wrongdoing, it feels like a teaching moment. And it is. But the lesson they often learn isn’t the one we’re trying to teach. They learn that honesty leads to lectures. They learn that vulnerability leads to feeling worse, not better. They learn to handle their mistakes alone.
Research published by the American Psychological Association has shown that parental psychological control, which includes guilt induction and love withdrawal, is associated with decreased willingness in children to disclose information to parents. Your lecture, however well-intentioned, may have functioned as a form of psychological control.
The next time they mess up, they’ll remember how the last confession went. And they’ll choose silence.
4) The time you shared their secret
This one is devastatingly common. Your child told you something in confidence. Maybe it was embarrassing. Maybe it was just private. And later, you mentioned it to your spouse, your sister, your friend. Perhaps you even told the story at a family gathering, thinking it was harmless or even endearing.
To your child, it was a betrayal.
I’ve seen this play out with my own kids when they were young. Something shared in the sacred space of a bedtime conversation would resurface at Sunday dinner, and I’d watch their face change. That micro-expression of hurt and recalibration. They were learning, in real time, that I couldn’t be trusted with their inner world.
Children don’t have many places where they hold power. Their secrets are one of the few things that belong entirely to them. When we take those secrets and distribute them without permission, we’re not just breaking confidence. We’re teaching them that nothing they give us is truly safe.
5) The time you invalidated their emotion
“You’re overreacting.” “It’s not that big a deal.” “You’re being too sensitive.” “There’s no reason to be upset about this.”
These phrases, and their countless variations, are emotional door-closers. They tell a child that their internal experience is wrong. Not just that their behavior needs adjusting, but that their very feelings are incorrect.
The problem is that feelings aren’t math problems. They can’t be wrong. They can be disproportionate, misdirected, or based on misunderstanding, but the feeling itself is simply real. When we tell children their emotions are invalid, we’re essentially telling them they can’t trust their own internal compass.
So they stop sharing that compass with us. They still feel everything, probably more intensely than we remember feeling things at that age. But they feel it alone, because they’ve learned that bringing those feelings to us results in being told the feelings shouldn’t exist.
As developmental psychologist Dr. Laura Markham has noted, children need their emotions acknowledged before they can move through them. When we skip the acknowledgment and jump straight to correction, we interrupt their emotional development and our connection to them simultaneously.
6) The time you compared them to someone else
“Why can’t you be more like your brother?” “Your cousin never gives her parents this kind of trouble.” “When I was your age, I would never have…”
Comparison is a particular kind of poison. It doesn’t just criticize the behavior. It criticizes the self. It says, essentially, that who they are is insufficient. That somewhere out there exists a better version of a child, and you wish you had that one instead.
I’ve made this mistake. Most parents have. It usually comes from a place of frustration, a desperate grasp at motivation. But it doesn’t motivate. It alienates.
When a child feels compared unfavorably, they face a choice. They can try to become the person you’re comparing them to, which means abandoning their authentic self. Or they can protect their authentic self by withdrawing it from your view. Most choose the latter, because authenticity is precious and they’d rather hide it than have it criticized.
The comparison doesn’t even have to be explicit. Kids pick up on implicit comparisons too. They notice which sibling gets more praise, which cousin gets held up as an example, which of their friends you seem to prefer. And they draw conclusions about their own worth in your eyes.
7) The time you made their problem about you
Your child comes to you struggling with something. A friendship falling apart. Anxiety about school. Confusion about who they are. And somehow, within minutes, the conversation has shifted to your feelings about their problem. Your worry. Your disappointment. Your fear about what this means for their future.
Suddenly they’re not just dealing with their original problem. They’re also managing your emotional reaction to it. They’ve become your caretaker in a moment when they needed you to be theirs.
This is an easy trap to fall into because parental love is fierce. When our children hurt, we hurt. When they struggle, we struggle. But there’s a difference between feeling those feelings and centering them in a conversation that should be about the child.
Kids who experience this learn to filter what they share based on what they think you can handle. They’ll tell you the version of events least likely to upset you. They’ll minimize their struggles to protect you from worry. They’ll perform okayness because your reaction to their not-okayness is too much to deal with on top of everything else.
And eventually, they’ll just stop sharing altogether. It’s easier.
Where this leaves us
If you recognized yourself in any of these moments, please don’t let guilt be your takeaway. Guilt is useless unless it transforms into something else. Let it become awareness instead.
The beautiful thing about children, even adolescent children who seem determined to prove otherwise, is that they want to be connected to you. The wall they’ve built has a door in it. They’re waiting to see if you’ll notice it. They’re waiting to see if you’ve changed.
You can’t undo the moments that built the wall. But you can stop adding bricks. You can start showing up differently. You can listen without laughing, attend without distraction, receive confessions without lectures, keep secrets sacred, validate emotions, resist comparison, and hold space for their problems without making those problems about you.
It won’t be a quick fix. Trust rebuilt is slower than trust broken. But kids are watching. They’re always watching. And when they see consistent evidence that you’ve become a safer place to land, many of them will eventually take the risk of landing again.
The question is: what will you do differently the next time they offer you a piece of themselves?
