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Child Development
Why Don't My Kids Call Me More?!
9 questions to give parents clarity.
Posted August 27, 2019 Reviewed by Devon Frye
How often should adult children call their parents? The question crosses racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and sits at the heart of many heated family arguments and hurt feelings.
For parents, underlying the reminders to call home may be questions like “Am I still important to you?” and “What is my role in your life?” For others, the message is simply “I love you and miss you.” When a child does not maintain contact up to the parent’s standard, the parent may feel confused and rejected.
Still, my 20- and 30-something clients frequently struggle with how to honor their parents’ expectations and wishes for greater contact, listing myriad reasons why calling home remains difficult.
Working through those struggles and creating a mutually satisfying arrangement is the shared responsibility of parents and children. But if you are a confused or hurt parent looking for clarity about why your kids don’t call more often, here are nine questions you can ask yourself.
1. Do my child and I share expectations?
Parents and children may calculate closeness and communication frequency differently. Adult children may count emails and texting as communication while parents prefer to speak by phone. Children may feel satisfied checking in weekly while parents want to speak every day. Phone call length may also become a point of disagreement. Some are happy to make shorter check-in phone calls while others prefer hour-long catch-up calls.
Have you and your child verbalized these expectations? For some families I work with, these expectations remain wholly unspoken until one side feels hurt or shut out. Amid the hurt, tactics—such as guilting a child into calling more—may be deployed rather than having a meaningful conversation about what it means to stay close. Find a neutral time and non-judgmentally ask to work together to get on the same page. Speak in terms of what you need rather than what your child does or doesn’t do.
2. Do I take responsibility for reaching out, too?
Some parents feel that the onus of maintaining the relationship lies squarely on the child’s shoulders as repayment for raising them. Regardless of whether that sense of entitlement is justified, the reality is that this attitude may sabotage what could otherwise be a fruitful, mutual relationship. Nurture your relationship with your adult child as you would a friend—with the expectation that each person will exert effort to keep in touch, spend time together, and connect.
3. Are my child’s boundaries being respected?
Some clients have confided that conversations with parents frequently turn to subjects they’ve repeatedly requested be off limits, such as dating status, religion, weight, finances, and politics. Because every person will have different boundaries, it is the child’s job to verbalize their boundaries in a loving, respectful, calm way. It is not a parent’s job to read their child’s mind and “just know” what the child will and won’t be comfortable discussing.
Once those boundaries are asserted, however, if a parent repeatedly violates them by asking about or trying to discuss off-limit topics, the child may pull away, feeling frustrated and resentful. They may begin to avoid phone calls home. If you notice that conversation tone becomes sharp around certain subjects or the child repeatedly tries to shut down a particular conversation, a boundary violation may have occurred. To avoid this, the parent and child should work together to hear each other and determine what topics of conversation feel comfortable for everybody.
4. Is my child’s recent lack of calling about me?
If there is a recent dip in phone calls, try to pause before personalizing it. If your child works 50 hours per week and is taking care of a family, they may genuinely struggle to find those moments to pick up the phone. If there has been a recent upheaval in your child’s life, such as a new job, a new baby, a move, a financial setback, or a relationship struggle, they may withdraw to focus on meeting their basic needs. Sometimes, the distance isn’t about us. It is OK to check in and take stock.
5. Do my child and I have much in common?
Unfortunately, family ties do not guarantee closeness between the generations. Children take on their own interests, values, beliefs, careers, relationships, and friends that may or may not look like their parents’. The resulting distance can be extremely painful for both parents and children.
Seek common ground. Do you and your child both love to cook? Do you read the same books? Do you both love baseball? Look for those subjects that draw you together. Remember also that distance may be a function of life stage rather than a permanent fixture of the relationship. Throughout the life cycle, parents and children may find that there are periods of time, such as around the birth of a child, in which they connect more seamlessly than others. This is normal and natural to life’s ebb and flow.
6. Do conversations with my children go both ways?
Occasionally, a client will tell me that they dislike calling their parent because when they call, the conversation revolves exclusively around the parent’s life, interests, and issues. When the child does speak about their life, the parent invariably turns the discussion back to themselves. This leads the child to feel that their parent is not interested in their life. They then feel unheard and uncared for and start to avoid depleting phone calls. Start to notice if it feels like there is reciprocity in your phone calls. It may be that an adjustment is in order.
7. Am I offering unwanted advice?
When work is stressful, when a date went poorly, when a longtime friendship hits a rough patch, your child may want to talk to you about it. But they may not be looking for motherly or fatherly advice. They may be seeking out support and a listening ear. They want their pain seen and acknowledged. They want to vent and know that they’re understood and aren’t crazy for feeling the way they feel.
If you’ve found that when you give advice that it’s met with irritation, frustration, or “but…”, it could be that your child is looking to you for support, not solutions. When their phone calls are repeatedly met with unwanted advice, they may pull back. In this pattern, the child can break the cycle by pre-empting the conversation by saying something like, “So I’m feeling pretty frustrated right now, but I’m not looking for advice. Would you mind listening to me and just reassure me that I’ll figure this out?” If a parent wants to be proactive, they can ask something like, “Are you looking for support and a listening ear or do you want advice?”
8. Is there something my child and I haven’t resolved in our relationship?
Adult children may not call often if there is an unresolved childhood hurt. It can feel easy to downplay the gravity of childhood pain; to parents, these old issues may feel irrelevant or minor. If your child doesn’t call you as often as you’d like or your relationship lacks the closeness you crave, there may be some old wounds that need tending to.
Sometimes, the hardest part about addressing these wounds is the fact that parents and children inevitably recall childhood events through very different lenses. While a parent may remember their own stress, exhaustion, and financial fears, the child may only remember their parent’s aloofness when they came home from school. While a parent may remember arguments with their spouse and the impact it had on the marriage, the child may carry the scars of tiptoeing nervously around the house or trying to keep the peace.
If there are old wounds, be open to discussing them. Listen to your child with the intent to understand their lived experience, not with the intent to respond or explain. Their memory will differ from yours, but each of you experienced that childhood in legitimate ways. With all that parents do for their children, making room for this process can be difficult. But improving a relationship means making room for another’s experience and reality and acknowledging that point of view.
9. How am I communicating my needs to my child?
Sometimes, a pattern of disconnection perpetuates out of habit, but both parties struggle to work their way out of it. When a parent feels disconnected from their adult child, they may deploy guilt tactics to get them to call more. They may blame the child for the parent’s state of being by saying something like, “I feel so lonely when you don’t call. I have nobody to talk to.” A parent may also use comparison: “Your brother calls me every week; why can’t you?” or sense of duty: “I raised you; you owe me a call once per week.” While the guilt often succeeds in the short term, it sows discontent and disconnection in the long term. The child may resent the tactic and distance themselves, which leads the parent to turn back to guilt to reconnect once again.
It may be time for a new way of speaking to your child. Parents may need to acknowledge their past tactics while explaining that it comes from a deep love for the child, a desire to be part of their life, and a fear that they will be left out.
The Hard Questions
These are hard questions, and they focus on questions that parents can ask themselves if they’re looking for clarity. Ultimately, however, parents and children share the responsibility for communicating their needs effectively, honoring each other’s boundaries, and consistently working on the health of the relationship.
