Why Your 10 Year Old Won’t Talk About Anything Serious (And What Actually Works)
My 10-year-old Javi leans against the kitchen counter, one foot propped on the lower cabinet, scrolling TikTok while I cut Honeycrisp apples into slices. The counter’s sticky with orange juice from breakfast, and his gray Minecraft hoodie has a frayed hole at the elbow from falling off his skateboard last weekend. I’d fished an email out of my spam folder that morning from his school counselor: Javi’s been sitting out recess for a week, after a fight with his best friend Milo. She suggested I check in. I wipe my knife off on a dish towel and say, “Heard you and Milo had a rough time last week. Wanna talk about it?” Javi doesn’t look up from his phone. “It’s fine.” I try again. “Mrs. Lopez said you didn’t play soccer yesterday. Was something going on?” He shrugs, grabs an apple slice, and takes a loud bite. “Did you see the new Minecraft update? They added cherry groves.” That’s that. The conversation’s over before it started.
I’ve worked part-time as an after-school program lead for seven years, so I know all the scripts about listening and validating feelings. I’ve written those tips down for new parents myself. But with my own kid, none of it stuck. Every time I tried to bring up anything harder than what he wanted for dinner, he’d swerve back to YouTube stats or skate trick fails, like I was a telemarketer he was trying to get off the phone. After my grandma died last spring, I asked him three times over a week if he wanted to talk about missing her. Each time he just said “No, can we play Uno?” I started worrying I’d messed up—broken our communication somehow, that he’d never feel comfortable coming to me with hard stuff.
I sat down with his elementary school counselor a few weeks after the fight with Milo to pick her brain, and what she said stuck with me. Ten is just a weird in-between age. Little kids will spill every feeling they have the second it pops up, because they haven’t learned to be embarrassed or to carry weight on their own. Teens will vent for hours to their friends, or post their feelings online, because they’re leaning into that big emotional phase. Ten year olds are right in the middle: they know big feelings aren’t something you just cry about and get a hug and move on from, but they don’t have the words to untangle what they’re feeling yet. Most of the time, they just don’t want to feel put on the spot, like they’re performing vulnerability for you.
That’s when I stopped doing the big “we need to talk” sit-downs and started testing small, low-pressure changes that actually worked. The first thing I did was stop asking direct questions and start sharing tiny, vulnerable stories from my own childhood when we were already doing something else side-by-side. No eye contact required, no waiting for a response. I do this when we’re driving to soccer practice, folding laundry, or washing the car—things where we’re both busy, so it doesn’t feel like an interrogation. Last month, on the way to get ice cream after practice, I said offhand, not looking at him, “I remember when my best friend in fifth grade stopped talking to me. I was so embarrassed I didn’t tell my mom for a whole month. I just kept thinking it was my fault.” I turned the radio up a little after that, and didn’t say anything else. Two minutes later, he said, “Milo called me a baby because I wouldn’t climb the big rope wall at recess. He knows I hate heights.” That was it—two sentences, then he changed the subject back to the ice cream flavor he wanted. I didn’t push for more, didn’t ask him to expand on how he felt. I just said “That sucks. He shouldn’t have said that” and left it. That was enough.
Another thing I stopped doing is requiring that he talk about hard things at all, if he doesn’t want to. After my grandma died, I stopped bringing her up unprompted, and just said once, “If you ever want to talk about her, or even just look at old photos, I’m here. No rush.” A week later, we were sitting on the couch watching a cartoon, and he just said out of the blue, “Grandma used to let me eat raw cookie dough before dinner.” I just said “She did, that was her favorite trick to sneak you treats, wasn’t it?” and we left it at that. He didn’t need a 20-minute processing session. He just needed to say it out loud, and have me hear it. If he wants to get his feelings out through drawing comic strips about bad days that he never shows anyone, that’s fine too. It doesn’t have to be a conversation with me to count.
It doesn’t work every time. Last week, I got a note that he failed his last fractions test, and I brought it up casually while we folded socks. I said “Fractions felt impossible to me when I was your age, I used to hide my bad tests from my mom too.” He just grabbed his stack of socks and walked to his room, shutting the door behind him. Some days he still just doesn’t want to go there.
But last week, on the drive home from practice, he brought something up on his own: he said he’s scared he won’t make the travel soccer team next year, that he’s not fast enough. It was 45 seconds of talking, then he put his headphones in. I didn’t solve it, I didn’t give him a pep talk. I just nodded and said “That’s a really scary thing to think about.” That’s all he wanted. He’s not shutting me out, I’ve learned. He’s just learning how to carry his own hard things, one small step at a time. I’m just here, waiting, whenever he’s ready to hand me a piece of it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Your 10 Year Old Won’t Talk About Anything Serious (And What Actually Works)