What Kids Won't Tell Their Parents |
Children hold back for reasons that make sense to them, including fear of our reaction and family reputation.
Young people who can’t disagree safely often comply on the surface and hide what they really do.
Side-by-side conversations and calm reactions to small news make bigger disclosures more likely.
November is a good month to be a child in the Gulf. The heat has broken, and families are outside in the evenings for the first time since spring. It is also the point in the school year when the novelty has worn off. Friendship groups have settled, and the first-term report cards are a few weeks away.
For many parents, this is when “How was school?” starts to get the same one-word answer every afternoon: "Fine."
Here in the Gulf, that answer can cover a lot. Our children attend demanding schools in a competitive environment. Their friendship groups shift every year as families arrive and leave, and many of them have been the new child more than once. They are navigating friendship politics and the pressure to do well, and much of it never comes up at home.
This is not unusual, and it is not a sign that something is wrong. Keeping some things private is a normal part of growing up. The more useful question is what leads children to open up.
Where Parents’ Knowledge Really Comes From
Two influential studies by Kerr and Stattin (2000) examined how parents come to know about their children’s lives. The common assumption was that parents who ask more questions and keep closer track know more. Instead, the researchers found that parents’ knowledge came mostly from what their children chose to tell them. Spontaneous disclosure, rather than tracking or questioning, predicted how much parents knew, and it was linked to better adjustment in the children themselves.
We cannot question our way into our children’s inner lives. We can only make it more likely that they will let us in.
Why Children Hold Back
Smetana and colleagues (2006, 2009) found that children’s reasons for keeping things to themselves vary. Some matters feel personal, and privacy is part of developing independence. Others are things children expect their parents to disapprove of, so they weigh the cost of our reaction against the relief of telling us.
In our part of the world, there is an additional layer. In my research with Arab families, honor and reputation came up again and again as issues that mattered to young people and their parents, and they were not well captured by the Western........