A beautifully awkward conversation

What do I say to a teenager that doesn't want to talk to me?

Last night, I knocked on the door of my 17-year-old daughter’s bedroom.

“Yeah?”

I walked in and sank myself into the bean bag that sits at the foot of her bed. She raised her eyebrows. This was unusual.

“What’s up?” she asked.

I’d noticed that we’d recently fallen into a pattern where we each mostly do our own thing separately between dinner and her bedtime. This has created a gap in our communication and it only grows as the pattern persists. Because her mother and I are divorced, we already only see each other every other month.

The conversation didn’t start well.

When I came in she was watching a movie on her phone. Reacting to my guilt at not having done all the magical things that magical parents do to minimize their children’s screen time, I said the phone was “frying” her eyes and her brain.

“What’s it going to be like by the time you’re my age?!” I not-so-casually remarked.

Understandably defensive, she told me she doesn’t look at her phone as much as I think. Above all, she uses it to listen to music without looking at the screen, she said.

As I listened, I realized two things.

First, I’m worried about the way technology is impacting her entire generation, what’s happening to their attention spans, their reading habits, the way they relate to each other - and I feel mostly powerless to do anything about it.

Second, I have to admit that I’m pretty attached to my own phone. I don’t watch movies with it, but I sure do listen to a lot of podcasts. I often pick up this hunk of metal in empty moments before I know why I’m doing it.

I remembered that I didn’t come to my daughter’s room to scold her, but to try to connect. I admitted to her that I have my own phone habit and backed off, asking her about school, what music she is listening to these days, about her friends, about life. She gave me answers that were mostly short and sweet. I imagined she wanted the conversation to end as quickly as possible.

But something else was happening in the moments we call “awkward silences.”

Despite the minimal resonance between us, I kept hoping for something more. I kept searching my mind for something else to say. For her part, she eventually put her phone down and gave me her full attention. While she seemed to wonder why the conversation wasn’t over with each new awkward silence, her demeanor was also softening in a way that allowed me to feel more welcome.

I learned that her experience these days in school is “ok,” which, she further explained, means that “it’s going really well,” relative to last year when she actively hated school most of the time.

I learned that none of the bands she’d like to see live are touring right now. This disappointed her, but she said she was sure this would be different in the spring.

We talked about the recent debate online by fans of Stranger Things, about whether the recent series finale of that show was really the finale or not. We laughed as we agreed that the controversy mostly arose because fans couldn’t accept that the last episode could really be that bad.

“Yeah, my generation is pretty harsh,” she said.

I readily agreed with that statement and started riffing about other ways her generation seems harsh to me - before realizing the way this topic only invited antagonism between us.

At some point I made things truly awkward by saying out loud what I’d been thinking the whole time, surprising myself as I did so.

“It just seems like we barely talk anymore,” I said. “I mostly only see you at dinner, and it doesn’t last very long, and then you do your thing and I do mine, and it just seems like it’s becoming a habit.”

She looked at me, sighed and said, “Yeah, that’s valid. I see what you mean.”

For a few minutes we talked about that, each describing how we experience this disconnect. I told her I didn’t want to bug her, but I also wanted to break the pattern. She said there were important things on her mind but she didn’t want to share them. I asked, was because they were too private or because she thought I wouldn’t care?

“A little of both,” she said.

But I was glad that, all the same, she had told me that much.

At a certain point, I guessed that she was waiting for me to leave so she could get back to her movie. She said that was true, but she’d been doing her best to be patient.

“Come tuck me in around 10:20?” she asked.

“OK,” I said.

I went back to the living room to do my thing until it was time to kiss her goodnight.

Grounded Connection doesn’t come from magic formulas that fix every relationship all at once. Instead, it’s the ongoing practice of the four postures of love that creates the space to sit in the awkward silences and break the old patterns that keep us stuck.

I’ll be walking through those postures - kindness, connection, curiosity and play - in an interactive workshop offered twice next week, Tuesday, January 13 at 1pm EST and Thursday January 15th at 8pm EST.

Sign up below.