How to Hear What They Can’t Say Out Loud

Parenting Through the Emotional Weight of Goodbye

©Szabolcs Takacs via Canva

For parents of little or school-aged kids, stick with me. I’m writing this from the middle of a big transition—with my youngest daughter nearly grown and getting ready to leave. But what she said recently pulled something wide open, and I promise: this is for you, too.

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The college forms are signed.
The bags are almost packed.
The countdown is now measured in days—not weeks or months—and with it comes a different kind of remembering: one that reaches all the way back.

Not just the significant milestones.
But the micro-moments.
The sideways glances. The lingering in the doorway. The sudden softness that appears just before a change.

Lately, I’ve been watching my daughter more closely—seeing the past and future versions of her flicker in the same frame. She’s ready. We’ve done the prep. And still, there’s a quiet emotional negotiation happening between us.

We both feel it.
We both avoid naming it.
Until she did.

In a moment of verbal untangling of all the big feelings, I asked if she was feeling hesitant. She paused, then said something I wasn’t ready for:

“It’s not that I don’t want to go. I just don’t want to leave.”

That line. That line says everything. Not just about this moment—but about so many moments in childhood. About the hidden emotional calculus kids are doing all the time as they grow.

This isn’t new. This feeling didn’t start now. She’s been saying versions of this since she was little. Our kids all do.

They just don’t usually say it out loud.

What’s Hiding Behind Their Hesitation

That sentence—“I just don’t want to leave”—shows up long before college. It shows up in the meltdown at preschool drop-off. In the sudden clinginess before a sleepover. In the bedtime stall tactics. In the surly teenager who snaps before walking out the door, then texts before reaching their destination.

It looks like resistance. Defiance. Avoidance. But often, it’s something far more tender.

Sometimes it’s grief.
Sometimes it’s fear.
Sometimes it’s an aching loyalty to the life they’ve known—even when they’re ready to outgrow it.

So much of growing up is ambivalence: wanting to stretch and shrink at the same time. Wanting to go forward and hold on. Kids live in that emotional split. And because they don’t always have the language, it comes out distorted—as anger, anxiety, control, withdrawal.

We misread it. We think our kids are afraid of what’s out there. But more often, they’re unsure of what will happen in here—inside this relationship—when they take the next step.

And the younger they are, the more this tension gets disguised as misbehavior. Because they don’t yet know how to say what they’re feeling, so they say it with tears. Or tantrums. Or door slams. Or silence. And we miss what’s actually being offered: emotional data that says, This is hard. I want what’s next, but I don’t want to lose what’s now.

What Our Kids Are Really Asking

What surprised me wasn’t just that my daughter named the emotion—it’s what she named as the reason. It wasn’t fear of being on her own. It wasn’t the workload or the change or the homesickness.

It was us.

She said, “I don’t know what will happen to us. That’s what I’m scared of.”

And I believe her because, while I’m convinced we’ll stay close, I’m wondering what it will look like, too.

It’s something we don’t talk about enough—the relational grief that comes with developmental growth. We tell kids they’re “ready,” that “they’ve got this,” that they’re “going to do great.” But rarely do we teach them how to grieve the loss of a familiar closeness. We forget to tell them that the sadness they feel doesn’t mean they’re not ready—it means they’re aware.

Kids aren’t just wondering if they’re ready for the world.
They’re wondering if the bond survives once they go.

That question—What will become of us when I grow?—hides in so many moments. Sometimes it’s faint. Sometimes it’s loud and messy. Sometimes it sounds like a slammed door or a brush-off or an eye roll that says whatever.

But it’s there.

And if we don’t recognize it, we risk addressing the behavior without responding to the need.

Being the Anchor, Not the Rope

So what do we do with all of this?

We stay steady.
We stop trying to fix the feeling.
We resist the urge to rush them through it or pull them back toward comfort.

Instead, we offer something steadier—and stronger.
We remind them, in a hundred small ways, that the relationship doesn’t dissolve just because the proximity changes.

A child stepping out—into school, into adolescence, into independence—doesn’t need us to grip harder. They need to know we won’t disappear when they loosen their hold.

That doesn’t always involve big speeches or lengthy talks.
Most often it sounds like:
I’ll miss you too. But we’re still us.
You can feel two things at once. That’s okay.

Sometimes it looks like a rhythm we keep showing up for.
A note tucked in a backpack.
A text sent at the same time every night.
A phrase from toddlerhood that still makes them smile.

These aren’t just habits. They’re emotional placeholders that say, We’re still connected. I’m not going anywhere.

The truth is, some reassurance doesn’t land when it’s needed most.
It has to be built before the goodbye.

The safety our kids feel during transition is shaped by the emotional predictability we’ve already provided.

If they trust our steadiness, they won’t need to test it as often.
If they’ve experienced repair after rupture, they won’t assume silence means disconnection.
If they know love doesn’t require closeness to stay strong, they won’t confuse growing up with growing apart.

That’s what it means to be the anchor—not the rope.
We don’t hold them back.
We hold steady, so they can move freely—without fear that we’ll vanish the moment they drift.

Strong Enough to Stay Soft and Still

This isn’t about holding it together.
It’s not about brave faces or tidy goodbyes.
It’s not about pretending we’re fine so they feel okay.

Real strength looks different here.
It asks more of us—and offers less certainty in return.

It’s believing that the bond is strong enough to stretch.
It’s trusting that the love we’ve built is spacious enough to hold change, distance, evolution—and still feel like home.
It’s staying present in the pause—the emotional middle—without needing to close it.

Because that’s where our kids are.
Not fully gone. Not fully here.
Still orbiting what they’ve known.
Still wondering if this connection is future-proof.

It takes enormous courage to stay with what we’ve spent years trying to avoid—uncertainty, contradiction, powerlessness.

We can’t solve this moment with a rule or a well-timed routine.
We can’t logic them into ease.
We can’t manage it away with a checklist.

This kind of courage lives in the unknown.
It’s emotional stamina. Presence without clarity.
It’s watching our child inch away with both hope and hesitation—and resisting the urge to pull them back or push them forward.

It asks us to let their experience be real and unedited—not to protect them from it or rescue them out of it, but to be with them inside it—fully, steadily, without flinching.

Because that’s what proves the bond can hold.
That’s courage.

For Every Age and Every Parent

When they cry before daycare, when they pull away in middle school, when they suddenly need us in ways that don’t quite make sense—they’re not just stalling or resisting.
They’re asking: Can I grow without losing you?

And our job isn’t to stop the growing.
It’s to keep answering—over and over, in a thousand ways—Yes. You can.
Even when they can't name the question.
Even when it shows up messy.
Even when it sounds like something else entirely.

Because the moment we’re in is only partially about college.
It’s also about every moment that came before it—the thousands of small separations that brought us here.
The hundreds of ways my daughter already asked, If things change… will we still have this?
And the ways I’ve answered, again and again: When you go, I’m still here.

As we inch closer to goodbye, I hold that sentence close—hers and mine.
She can go.
I’ll be here.
And I’ll keep trusting what we’ve spent years building.