They Answer In One Word Now

You asked how school was and they said fine, and that was the whole conversation for the day.

And it was not always this. That is the part that unsettles you. There was a version of this person who talked at you continuously about things you did not follow, in the car, without pausing, and you cannot name the week that stopped.

So you have been asking more questions, which is the natural thing to do, and it has made it worse, and now you are asking questions and watching yourself ask them and hearing how they sound.

Two things I will not do.

I am not going to give you a way to get them to open up. There are techniques for that and they do not work, and the reason they do not work is that a child can identify a technique instantly, and being handled is a great deal worse than being left alone.

And I am not going to tell you that the silence means something is wrong. It usually does not. A person who is becoming a separate person stops narrating themselves to their parents, and that is not a symptom, it is the thing happening on time.

If you are actually worried, if something has changed in them that frightens you, that is different and it is not what this article is for. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, and do it sooner rather than waiting to be sure.

None spake a word unto him

There is a moment early in Job that gets skipped because everybody is in a hurry to get to the arguing, and it is the best thing his friends ever did.

So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great. (Job 2:13, King James Version)

None spake a word unto him.

Seven days. On the ground. Not one question, not one piece of comfort, not one attempt to establish what was going on or how he was feeling about it.

And it is worth noticing that everything that went wrong afterwards started when they opened their mouths. The sitting was right. The talking was where it fell apart.

So Scripture has a picture of presence with no words in it at all, and it does not treat that as a failure to connect. It treats it as the thing the situation required.

Job 2:13 records seven days of company without a single question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach a parent standing in a hallway with a question already loaded.

You are able to be with them without a word in your hand, and company has never once required a conversation. Job 2:13 says none spake a word unto him and puts that down as what was right, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes silence an act rather than a failure.

Every question is a small bill

Now the mechanic, because I think it will change what you do this evening.

A question, however warm, arrives as something to be handled. It needs an answer, and the answer needs choosing, and a young person who has spent all day performing for teachers and for other young people has been choosing answers since eight in the morning.

So when they come in and you ask three warm questions in the first four minutes, you are not being unkind, and it is still three more things to handle at the exact point they have run out of the capacity for it.

Job 2:13 has the friends sitting without asking anything at all, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring anybody to produce a conversation tonight.

That is why fine is not a rejection. It is the cheapest available answer offered by somebody who has nothing left, and it is aimed at the question rather than at you.

You are not being shut out, and one word answers have never once been about you. The written word shows company with no questions in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a parent's fine out of the category of rejection.

Twenty minutes, no questions

So here is the assignment, and the constraint is the whole of it.

Be in the same room doing nothing for twenty minutes, without asking a question.

Doing nothing means something ordinary that does not need them: reading, folding something, sitting with a cup of tea. Not on your phone, because a phone reads as absence to somebody who has grown up watching it.

No questions. None. Not even how was your day, not even a warm one, not even the one you are about to justify to yourself as different.

You may say things. Statements are fine and they cost nothing: it is cold in here. I burnt the toast this morning. That is a good song.

And then stay. Twenty minutes is longer than it sounds and about eleven minutes in you will feel the pull to fill it, and that pull is the whole test.

They may say nothing at all. That is a successful twenty minutes. They may, somewhere around the fifteenth minute, say something completely unrelated to anything, and if they do, do not follow it up with a question, because that is how a child learns that speaking triggers an interview.

Job 2:13 has seven days of sitting with no conversation in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in twenty minutes of a room with nothing being asked.

You are able to stay without filling it, and the twenty minutes has never once needed them to speak to have worked. Job 2:13 records the sitting as the right thing rather than the preliminary to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a parent still at minute eleven.