The questions you can't answer
Module 05 · Talking to children · Article 13 · v3 · all ages
Tuesday evening, 20:14. You're folding laundry on the bed. Your eleven-year-old wanders in. She sits on the corner of the bed, picks up a folded t-shirt, examines it. She says, Will you and Daddy ever be friends again?
You stop folding. You look up. You don't know the answer to this question.
This article is about that moment. The moment when the child asks something real, important, and unanswerable. The temptation, at that moment, is to fill the space with something that sounds like an answer. Maybe someday. We're trying. I hope so. These sentences are not lies, exactly. They're also not the truth. The truth is I don't know, and I don't know feels too small to give the child.
This is one of the most consequential things to learn in the talking-to-children territory. I don't know is not a small answer. It is, often, the most honest and useful answer you can give. The child can hold I don't know better than they can hold a fabricated certainty that, six months later, turns out not to be true.
The questions that come
A partial taxonomy of the questions a child of separation will, over the years, ask their parents. None of them have clean answers.
Will you and Daddy ever be friends again?
Why didn't you try harder?
Did you ever love each other?
Do you still love Daddy in any way?
Did Daddy do something bad?
Did you cheat? Did Daddy cheat?
Would I have a brother or sister if you'd stayed together?
What if you'd never met Daddy?
Will Daddy and Sarah get married?
When I get married, will you and Daddy both come to my wedding?
Will you and Daddy stand together when I graduate from school?
Will you both come to my birthday parties?
What's going to happen when I'm older?
Will we still see each other when I'm grown up?
Am I going to be okay?
Are you going to be okay?
Will I ever feel normal?
Will this be different in a year? In five years? When I'm a teenager?
Will I get divorced too?
Is this normal?
Some of these have partial answers. Some have answers that depend on things you can't control. Some have no answer at all. The shape of how to handle them is the same.
What's behind the question
When a child asks a hard question, they are usually not asking for a forecast. They are asking for one of three things, sometimes more than one at once.
They want to know you're still there. Can I ask you a hard thing and you'll be okay? The question itself is partly a test of the relationship. Can this parent hold a hard topic without falling apart? Without getting cross? Without making me feel bad for asking?
They want to know that the future has shape. Children, especially after separation, have a high need to know that the future is, at least in broad strokes, predictable. Will we still see each other when I'm grown up? is the child checking whether the basic facts of family life will continue.
They want help holding something they're already feeling. Will you and Daddy ever be friends? may be the child sitting with a current sadness about how things are between you and the Co-Parent right now. The question is a vehicle for the feeling. Answering the literal question may miss what the child is actually saying.
The work is hearing which of these the child is asking, and responding to that.
How to answer
There are three moves that work for almost any question on this list. They can be combined.
One: Acknowledge the question is real. Not patronisingly. Don't say that's a great question. Just: That's a real one to ask. Or: I've thought about that too. Or: I don't have an easy answer. The child needs to know the question is being taken seriously, not deflected.
Two: Say what you do know. Often there's a part of the question you can answer. I don't know if Daddy and I will be friends. I know we're working at being polite to each other. I know we both love you and we're going to keep showing up to things that matter to you. You're not promising friendship. You're naming what's true.
Three: Hold the uncertainty without fixing it. Don't fill I don't know with a hope sentence. Just sit with it. I don't know if Daddy and I will be friends. I hope we'll be on okay terms. I don't know yet. I think it'll get easier with time, but I can't promise.
This third move is the hardest. The instinct is to comfort the child by giving them something definite. The cost of giving them something definite that turns out not to be true is much higher than the cost of giving them honest uncertainty.
A few specific questions, worked through
Will you and Daddy ever be friends again?
I don't know. I hope we'll be on okay terms over time. We're both working at being civil. Whether that becomes friendship, I can't promise. What I can promise is that we're going to be at things together when they matter to you. Birthdays. Graduations. Big moments. We'll be there. That doesn't depend on being friends.
This separates two things. The friendship question, which you can't promise. The presence question, which you can.
Why didn't you try harder?
We did try. For a long time. I'm sorry it wasn't enough. I wish it had been different. I don't know if there's a version of us trying harder that would have worked. I think we tried as hard as we knew how to.
This is grief-handling. The honest answer is: maybe we could have tried harder, maybe we couldn't, we'll never fully know. Sit with the grief instead of defending yourself.
Did Daddy do something bad?
The reasons we separated are between Daddy and me, and most of them aren't yours to carry. Sometimes things ended for reasons that aren't really anyone's fault. Sometimes things ended for reasons that are partly someone's fault. I'm not going to talk about the specifics with you. When you're older, if you still want to talk about it, we can have a different conversation.
The line holds. (See Article 02 on what to tell children about the why.)
Will Daddy and Sarah get married?
I don't know. That's a Daddy question. You can ask him. I'd be glad for him if they did, and I want you to have my permission to be glad for him too. Whatever they decide, you'll still be loved by both of us.
Permission language. (See Article 12.)
Are you going to be okay?
Yes. I'm having a hard time some days. I have people I talk to. I'm doing the work to be okay. You don't have to take care of me. That's not your job.
Honest, brief, with the parentification limit named.
Will I get divorced too?
I don't know. I don't think anyone gets to know that about themselves in advance. Some kids of separated parents end up in long marriages, some end up separating, lots of kinds of lives happen. What I know is that you've watched two adults handle a hard thing the best they could, and that's actually a useful thing to have watched.
Reframes the question. The fear underneath is am I broken. The answer is no, you're a kid who has watched grown-ups do something hard.
Will I ever feel normal?
Yes. Differently. Eventually, this becomes the shape of your life and not a strange thing that happened. It takes a while. It happens.
Permission to grieve, gentle confidence about the long arc.
When the question is one you actually do know the answer to but can't share
Sometimes the child asks a question you do know the answer to, but the answer isn't appropriate for the child to receive. Did Daddy have an affair? Why did Mama really leave? You know the answer. You can't share it. (See Article 02 and Article 07.)
In these cases, I don't know is not honest. Better is the version that names the holding-back.
I'm not going to answer that with you right now. There are some specifics between Daddy and me that aren't yours to carry. When you're older, if you still want to ask, we can talk about it differently.
The child can hold this. What they can't hold is being lied to and then, years later, discovering the lie.
When the question is rhetorical
Sometimes the child asks something they don't actually expect an answer to. Why is this happening to me? Why couldn't we just be a normal family? These are not real questions. They're grief in the form of a question.
The right response is not answer-giving. It's witnessing. I know. It's so unfair. I wish it was different too.
Then sit with it. Don't try to fix the feeling. Don't list the silver linings. Just be with them while they sit with how hard it is.
What you teach by saying I don't know
A child who is consistently met with I don't know on real questions, and who watches their parent sit with the not-knowing rather than papering over it, learns several useful things about life.
They learn that grown-ups don't have everything figured out. This is actually a relief for a child who otherwise carries the burden of believing adults have it all worked out and they should too.
They learn that uncertainty is survivable. They watch a parent hold uncertainty in the room and not break. They learn that they can do the same thing.
They learn that honesty is more important than reassurance. They learn that they're being treated with respect, not protected from reality.
They learn that hard questions can be asked of you, and that the relationship will hold.
These are foundational lessons. They carry into adulthood. The cost of having a parent who could not say I don't know is, in the long run, larger than the cost of being given a forecast that turned out not to be true.
The repeated question
Some questions get asked many times. Will you and Daddy ever be friends again? may surface at age 9, again at age 12, again at 16. The right answer at each age is slightly different, because what's actually known has shifted.
The basic shape stays the same. Sit with the question. Acknowledge it. Say what you know. Hold the uncertainty. Don't promise. Don't crush. Repeat as needed.
Closing
The questions a child of separation asks are some of the hardest questions any parent will be asked in their lifetime. There is no script for them. Most of them don't have clean answers. The thing you're being asked for, usually, is not an answer. It's presence. It's the willingness to sit with a hard thing. It's the model of an adult who can hold uncertainty without falling apart.
I don't know is enough. I don't know, and I'm here is more than enough. I don't know, and I'm here, and we'll figure it out together over time is a sentence that, given to a child once a year for ten years, builds something durable.
Tuesday evening, 20:14. The folded t-shirt is back on the pile. You look at the eleven-year-old. You say I don't know if Daddy and I will ever be friends. I hope we'll be on good enough terms that we can be at your school things together. I think it might take a while. I'm sorry I can't give you a better answer than that. She nods. She picks up a sock. She helps you fold for a few minutes. The laundry gets done. The question is held. That's the shape of it tonight.