I Never Thought I’d Hear The Words, ‘You Don’t Understand’
Parenting 101 - read the room and learn to pivot.
I have always focused on being the parent that comes from a place of empathy. I see my children as people, as unique and entirely separate to me. Turning my kids into me has never been the goal.
So it came as a shock when my tween daughter shut me down. I didn’t see myself as the kind of parent to make a kid disconnect.
We were walking home from school, and she launched into a story about her best friend, who was acting weird. I listened intently and then asked a few questions. A minute later, she put a stop to the conversation. ‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’
Then she said three words that crushed me, ‘You don’t understand.’
She’d never said that before. It was hard to hear.
I eventually realised that shutting me out was a perfect communication.
For months she kept her world closed to me. I felt confused. She’d always brought her problems to me and lapped up my viewpoint. But it dawned on me, I had been experiencing her admiration less and less.
Wasn’t I being a good parent, opening her mind to the perspective of others?
I talked about it with my boyfriend, who asks great questions. He got me thinking.
I realised something – hidden inside my perspective is the idea that my daughter is too rigid. She has a lot of expectations of the people closest to her, and I thought she’d benefit from opening her point of view up — to see that other people can have different values to us.
But I could see why she rejected this. I hadn’t been keeping up.
Somewhere along the way, my advice started to feel like interference.
The truth is I hardly ever get to see how my daughter interacts with her friends at school. So the fixed mindset I had, of her rigidness, became my filter and that created the problem.
If you love somebody you should have no opinion, that’s what love means. An opinion is a way of fixing a person into a straight…
