Most of us believe we see our children clearly. We know their faces, their moods, the particular way they go quiet when something is wrong. We show up. We ask questions. We pay attention. And still, we can look right at them and miss them entirely.
Not because we aren’t trying. Because we are trying too hard to fix, to reassure, to move them toward okay. In that effort, we stop making room for where they actually are.
This is the quiet failure of attunement. It looks like love. It sounds like encouragement. But it can leave a child feeling profoundly alone in a room full of people who adore them.
Missing the Signals Through the Hope
My daughter spent several years navigating a significant medical experience. There were procedures, hospital visits, tests, and all of the uncertainty and disruption that comes with something like that landing in the middle of your adolescence. When it was finally over, we walked out of the doctor’s office and went to celebrate.
My daughter seemed off though. I questioned what was happening for her, and she told me she was happy not to be going back to the hospital, but that she was also, strangely, sad. It had been part of her life for a long time. She said she would miss the smell of the halls and the funny and wonderful nursing staff. She was glad that it was done, but didn’t trust that it was real, and, also, a little unsure of what would happen next.
I heard it. I noted it. I thought it was an understandable reaction to a long journey.
And then I moved on, because we were celebrating, and I really wanted to celebrate with her.
The Down Side of Generalized Encouragement
In the months that followed, she began having difficulty. Phantom pain, anxiety, and stomach issues. Slowly, a new picture came into focus: she was grieving.
She was grieving the connections she had built at the hospital. Our coffee and cocoa runs, on the way to appointments. The middle school experience she never fully got to have. And something I hadn’t anticipated at all: her own identity.
She had been told by me, by family, and encouraging adults everywhere how resilient she was. How strong. How brave. And she had internalized it so completely that when the hard thing ended, she was lost..
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she told me, “if I’m not the resilient medical girl, what do I do?.”
That stopped me.
Without meaning to, I had participated in building her an identity out of her suffering. Every time I said “you’re so strong,” every time I told her she could handle it, every time I met her pain with encouragement instead of presence I was, with the very best intentions, replacing her experience with a story about her experience.
What She Finally Said Out Loud
Several months later, we were back at the doctor’s office for nausea that had been lingering. When bloodwork was suggested, I felt a flash of anger. I got upset, began to cry, and demanded the doctor think of something else. She was done. She had given enough and they would just need to think about other options. This reaction startled my daughter. She had never seen me react that way, but in that moment I felt like I needed to stand between her and these very well-meaning doctors.
After the appointment I apologized for my outburst. She looked at me, calm and quiet, and said something I wasn’t prepared for.
She was wondering where that reaction had been all this time. She said my earlier encouragement felt false. That I couldn’t actually know when she was going to be done and every time I said we were close, it didn’t feel like comfort, it felt like I was trying to will-away a reality she was still living. She had stopped trusting my reassurances because it wasn’t honest. And somewhere underneath all of my optimism, she had felt alone.
She was right.
It wasn’t until she entered therapy for medical trauma that I began to understand what had actually happened between us. I had been relentlessly optimistic because seeing her in pain was almost unbearable for me. I thought if I modeled strength and grit, she would trust that she had it too. I was afraid that if she got lost in the hurt, I would get lost in the guilt and grief. So I stayed strong to keep us both above water. And in doing so, I left her to carry the weight of her pain alone.
What Attunement Actually Requires
Attunement is not presence. You can be in the room, at every appointment, at every hard moment, and still be attuned to your own needs rather than your child’s reality. True attunement requires something harder: the willingness to set down the story you need to be true long enough to ask what is actually true for them.
It means asking, and genuinely waiting for the answer. Not “How are you feeling?” as a prelude to reassurance, but “What is this like for you?” as an act of witness.
It means staying in the hurt with them instead of ushering them out of it. Letting them be sad, scared, and uncertain without rushing them toward okay.
My daughter didn’t need me to be strong. She needed me to be honest enough to sit beside her in a place I was afraid to go. She needed me to get it.
The Repair
How do you repair it when you have missed the offramp? You go back. You name what you missed. You ask them to tell you what it was actually like. And then you stay there, in whatever they say, without fixing it.
That is what attunement asks of us.
Not perfection. Not the absence of fear. Just the courage to see our children as they are, even when who they are is someone who is hurting, and the hurting is hard for us to hold.
This is our goal in connection.
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