Conversation is key to parenting, but how do you create the time and place?

On an uncertain day, I was sat together with my teenager. I drove her to school. She looked at her phone, I listened to the radio. No drama. All good. I was a good parent. But in terms of relationship and mentoring, it was a bleak, void landscape of scant deep communication. We were happy enough together, but nothing occurred. I call this space. It’s just generic time together. It’s not significant or productive. There’s nothing wrong with space; we all need it. But what if your role as a parent ends up being predominantly this kind of relational empty time?

Last night I got out of bed at gone midnight, to pick her up from the station. Of course, I did this just out of love, but I also knew this could be an excellent opportunity to get some non-intense one to one time with her - well worth giving up sleep for. In the car I asked open questions, looking her in the eyes whenever possible (!). She told me one of her friends had not achieved their grades at A Level, and about the ridiculous amounts of forms she had to fill in for starting university next month. I asked her how that made her feel and waited for her to finish her response before I formed a reply, acknowledging and enquiring about her own emotional responses to it all. I didn’t fill the air with longwinded advice based on my own agenda or preconceived outcomes but I provided a scaffold for her to build her own conclusions, and to deconstruct her own answers and feelings. I also offered to help her go through her forms with her if she wished to make use of my experience. This is when mentoring transforms blank space into valuable place. In both situations we sat in the car. But one time it was ‘space,’ the other it was a ‘place.’