Breaking Bad News to Teens: Just Do It

Posted by: Lourdes Lee Valeriano on December 02

“Why doesn’t Daddy tell me things?”

The question came during our drive back to New York from D.C., where my daughter spent Thanksgiving with her dad and I with my friends. Whenever she and I happen to be in Washington at the same time, she rides home with me. The long drive often turns into a debriefing session, during which she processes the time she spends with her father.

This time she was mulling the fact that she had asked after her uncle and had been told he was “unwell.” The very vagueness of the answer signaled to my 14-year-old that something was terribly amiss.

My ex most likely made the mistake many parents do when bearing bad tidings for their children: sugarcoat or soften with ambiguity. That’s a tendency I’ve caught myself indulging, especially now with the economy officially in recession, as I grapple with how much of my worries—about my job, my savings, her college fund, that trip to France that we’d been planning—I should share with my daughter. “She already has so much stress in her life, I don’t want to add to it,” I tell myself, when in truth she’s probably more than ready to deal with the truth.

I still regret the times when I tried to shield her from the reality of death. I decided not to bring my daughter, then a five-year-old, with me when I flew home to the Philippines for a week to attend my father’s funeral, depriving her of the chance to experience the conviviality of a Filipino wake. And on the advice of my daughter’s teacher, I didn’t take her to the memorial service of a second-grade classmate’s mom, who was killed on September 11. My daughter missed out on an occasion that became part of the collective memory of her grade. She’s still mad at me for leaving her home on both those times.

So on that long drive back to New York City, I suggested that she ask her dad more pointed questions. I told her that she is highly intuitive, so if she feels there’s something going on, she’s probably right. As for her father, well, he—like other parents who’ve spent years trying to shield their young children—now may have to do his daughter the service of letting her face bad news herself.

Here are tips for breaking bad news to children and teens.

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