Why does a perfectly loved teenager suddenly stop telling their parents anything real? Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen traces this back years earlier, to a moment that looks completely harmless at the time.
Picture a young child trying something — a bike, a instrument, a hard puzzle — and a parent says, with total sincerity, “You can do it!” If the child actually can do it, no harm done. But if the child genuinely can’t, something quieter happens underneath the encouragement. The child fails, and now draws one of two conclusions: either “I was capable and I still failed, so I’m a horrible creature,” or — more corrosively — “My parent told me I could do this and I can’t. They don’t actually know who I am.”
That second conclusion doesn’t register consciously at age five. It sinks in subconsciously. And Rabbi Kelemen says it resurfaces a decade later in a predictable way: at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, the teenager simply stops bringing things to their parents. Not out of rebellion — out of an intuitive, long-buried sense that “they won’t get it,” because somewhere back there, a message got installed: my parents don’t really know me.
The fix isn’t to stop encouraging children. It’s to make sure encouragement is accurate rather than automatic — tied to what a child can genuinely do, not what feels nice to say in the moment.
How to keep encouragement honest:
- Watch before you cheer. Get a real read on whether the task is within the child’s current ability before promising they’ll succeed.
- Separate effort praise from outcome praise. “You’re working hard at this” is almost always true. “You can definitely do this” isn’t always true.
- When a child fails anyway, validate the attempt, not a false prediction. “That was genuinely hard, and you went for it” keeps your credibility intact.
- Treat accuracy as a form of respect. A parent who reads a child correctly is a parent that child will keep talking to at fifteen.
The real currency a teenager is deciding whether to spend on you is trust that you actually see them. That account gets opened — or closed — far earlier than most parents realize.
For more of Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen’s teaching on raising children who stay close through adolescence, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.