You know the moment … you watch your kid participate in something like a game, a recital, a presentation and you see the problem. The one bit of feedback that would have made it work and then you have to say it.

There's this need to help your kids. To hand over the useful information immediately, while it's fresh, before it's lost. It feels like helping and then you say it, and they go quiet, and you're standing there wondering what just happened.

I think most of us give our kids feedback for our own benefit, not theirs.

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THE STORY THAT STARTED ME THINKING ABOUT THIS

A friend of mine is genuinely accomplished in musical theater. It's her field, and she knows what she's talking about and considered an expert. 

Her daughter came off stage after a show. Lit up, buzzing and my friend immediately started giving her notes. You could have done this. That bit would land better this way.

Not harsh or critical. Just helpful. Her daughter shut down completely. She wouldn't talk to her and they knew straight away that was probably not the right time.

I keep coming back to that, because I don't think she did anything unusual. She did the thing almost every parent does.

Including me. Including my husband. Including, probably, you.

WHAT THEY'RE ACTUALLY ASKING

Here's what I've come to understand about that moment.

When a kid comes off a stage or a court or field, their body is in a completely different state than yours. Adrenaline is still going. Their nervous system is lit up and their mind is racing through everything that just happened. The bit they messed up, the bit that went well, who saw it, how it felt.

They are not in a receiving state. There is no room in there for information and they've usually got exactly one question, even if they never say it out loud:

Did I do okay? Am I fine?

That's the whole question. They want to look at your face and find out whether they're alright.

So when the answer they get is well, here's what you could improve even if said kindly, even said by someone who genuinely knows, the advice isn't what lands. What lands is the answer to the question they actually asked.

THEN THEY TURN TWELVE

All of this gets harder around 12 or 13.

My younger son still takes feedback fine. He gets frustrated sometimes, but he doesn't take it personally. He still looks up to us and doesn't act like he already knows everything.

My older one is a tween now, and that shift has happened. He's at the age where he “knows” everything.

It turns out this isn't just an attitude. Researchers at Leiden University put teenagers in an MRI scanner and showed them criticism and compliments that appeared to come from their own parents. Criticism activated the regions involved in processing pain, the same areas that light up during physical pain.

So when your teen reacts to a mild suggestion like you've wounded them, they're not being dramatic. Something in there is genuinely registering it that way.

What comes out is you don't like anything I do, even when that's nowhere near what you meant.

I think it's because your parents are the people who know you best out of anybody. That's exactly what makes it land so hard. It doesn't fully stop at 20 either - you can be a grown adult who knows for a fact your parents mean well and still hear their feedback as criticism. Most of us can't help it.

THE EXPERT-PARENT PROBLEM

This is harder still if you actually know the subject.

My husband works in youth sports and medicine. It's his profession, he gives athletes technical feedback all day long, and he's good at it.

He has had to learn not to do it with our own kids because when he says the same sentence to our son that he'd say to a patient- ’you need to follow through on the ball’ it doesn't land as coaching. It lands as disapproval from his father. Same eight words, completely different meaning, entirely because of who's saying them.

At that moment our kids don't need an expert. They need a dad and you don't have to be an expert for this to happen. Plenty of parents who've never played the sport do exactly the same thing on the walk to the car. Why didn't you pass? If you'd just done this, it would have worked. The instinct is identical.

It's the right information at the worst possible moment.

THE COST, WHICH IS BIGGER THAN ONE AWKWARD CAR RIDE

Here's the part that actually worries me.

I know kids whose parents start in on the feedback the second they come off the soccer field. And what happens isn't just that the kid goes quiet that afternoon.

Sometimes they don't want to play again.

Not from one comment. From the accumulation, from slowly learning that the thing they love comes with a review attached, that there's always a debrief, always a note, always something that could have been better. So they stop wanting to do it. They go off it quietly, and nobody can point to the moment it happened.

That's what's actually at stake. Not their feelings in the car. Their relationship with the thing itself.

You don't want them to fall out of love with something because you kept correcting it.

TWO THINGS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

Go and do the thing with them.

My husband stopped giving our older son tennis feedback. He just goes and plays with him instead and then, naturally, mid-rally, our son asks. How do I do this? Why does that keep happening? Because he wanted to know, in a moment where nobody was making him receive anything.

Feedback they asked for and feedback you offered are different substances entirely. They don't even go to the same part of the brain.

For tweens and teens, the most reliable route is a trusted third person. A coach, another parent. A family friend. Someone they'll actually listen to.

This works every time and it stings a little, because it's usually the exact same information you already said and got ignored. Doesn't matter. If it lands coming from someone else, let it come from someone else. You're not trying to be right. You're trying to get it into them.

WHAT I DID (AND HOW LONG I WAITED)

My older son acts. A while back he had a callback for a commercial- a Zoom callback, so I was in the back of the room, listening, unable to do a single thing about any of it.

The director gave him some direction, and I could hear he wasn't taking it. He did a bit of it, but he wasn't really listening. I think he was just nervous; he'd been anxious about this one all week. He did fine otherwise. But he didn't take the direction, and I knew, sitting there, that he wasn't going to book it.

He didn't book it.

Here's what I said when he came off the call: Great job. You were awesome. You got through it.

That's it. Nothing else. He was so nervous and he had got through it, and both of those things were true and then I said nothing about it for months.

Until he got another callback, a different one, last week. What I said before that one was: Remember, in the moment, you have to listen to what the director's asking you to do. Just pay attention as much as you can.

I never mentioned the first audition. Then I asked if he wanted to practice. He said yes. So I gave him direction, completely made up, nothing to do with the real thing and he had to adjust to it on the spot.

The feedback got delivered. He got to use it and it never had to be attached to a failure.

There was no version of see, you didn't listen to him that would have helped. It would have hurt him and made him think about it more. Why would I put him in that?

THE PART I WANT YOU TO TAKE

Save the criticism for later. Or never.

I mean that. Some feedback doesn't need to be given at all. Sometimes kids work it out themselves, and the only thing saying it out loud adds is the knowledge that you were watching and finding it lacking.

Not every observation you have needs to become a sentence.

A Note for My Fellow Laid-Back Parents

I want to be clear that I'm not describing something other parents do.

I've bitten my tongue in a car and felt the words physically sitting there. My husband has had to build an actual discipline around not being excellent at his job inside his own house.

The urge to say it right now isn't a character flaw. It's just badly timed. You saw something true and you want to hand it over while it's still warm.

But the thing you noticed will still be true next Tuesday. It'll still be true at the next practice, or before the next audition, or at some moment when they turn to you and ask.

It keeps. That's the whole thing, it keeps.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛