Once a month, I send a short note to parents about what I'm seeing with the teens I work with — and what I wish more parents knew. No sales pitches. No seven-step frameworks. Just the thinking I do when I'm on a chairlift in North Lake Tahoe with a fourteen-year-old who hasn't said a word in an hour.
Speaking of which.
On the kind of silence that gets misread
Every parent of a teenager has been here. You ask a question, you get a shrug. You try a different angle, you get a one-word answer. You back off and tell yourself not to take it personally. And then you take it personally anyway.
Here's something I've learned from hundreds of teen sessions on the snow, on the trail, and in one-on-one conversations: silence doesn't always mean something is wrong.
When a teen goes quiet, it's rarely because they don't want to talk to you. More often, they're holding something complicated — a social situation, a fear about the future, a feeling they can't yet name. At that age, confusion feels embarrassing, and saving face matters more than we sometimes realize. So they sit with it, trying to sort it out on their own. And meanwhile, the parent tries to help. A worried parent problem-solves. A hopeful one reassures. A tired one lectures. All well-meant — and to a teenager in that moment, none of it is quite the right response.
What most teens actually want — but don't yet know how to ask for — is for someone to hold the space without immediately trying to fill it.
I see this most clearly when I take a teen out for a full day in the mountains. For the first few hours, we're mostly quiet: surface conversation between runs, a water stop, some silence on the lift. I don't push. Then somewhere around hour three, without fail, they start leading more of the conversation. Telling me things. Not because I asked. Because I didn't.
What you can do
You don't have to take your teen to the mountains to offer this. You can give them presence without pressure in ordinary moments: a car ride where you share music and let the quiet breathe, a walk where you're genuinely just walking, a shared task — making dinner, stacking wood, even doing a puzzle together — where the goal is the task, not the conversation. The key is that none of it feels forced.
What you're offering is one of the rarest things a teen experiences: presence without an agenda.
Most of the time, they'll talk. And if they don't, that's fine too. Sitting quietly with someone who isn't trying to fix you is, itself, a kind of love. They'll know it when they feel it — because you cannot not communicate. Everything says something, and sometimes the space in between, offered carefully and without judgment, says the most.
Talk next month.
— Al
P.S. If a specific situation with your teen is on your mind, reach out. I read every message.