We Heard What They Said. But Do We Know What They Meant?

Parent Education
Written By Eileen Grover

From the things that quite literally come out of the mouths of babes to the more complicated declarations of tweens and teens, what a child says and what they mean aren’t always exactly the same thing.

These are those moments when our children say something that is so out of pocket that it makes us stop and think, Well, that is quite a thought. Where or how did they actually come up with that? Other times, it’s what happens next. We say something, they react in a way that seems wildly disconnected from what we thought we just said. And that’s the clue that makes us think, Hold up. What just happened? Something’s not right. It is in these moments when a little bit of curiosity and a few more questions can help us understand what they were actually trying to tell us.

Because we all know, children say some pretty remarkable things.

What were they hearing, thinking, feeling, trying to understand, or meaning to say? What information do they have, or think they know? What dots are they trying to connect, what do those connections mean to them, and what are they actually trying to tell me or get me to understand?

That is the “why” behind getting curious about what our children just said and the “how” of how they got there.

Not to uncover some deeper, hidden meaning, but to make sure we have a better understanding of what our child is actually trying to tell, ask, or explain to us, rather than responding only to what we understood them to mean in those moments.

Much of the time, we are responding to what we heard them say, and the majority of those interactions go exactly as intended.

This is about those times when there is an unnoticed mismatch between our interpretation and their meaning.

We respond to what we thought they meant, just like the thousand times before, except this time our response lands completely off the mark of what they were actually trying to tell us.

The child said one thing.

The parent interpreted what they heard through their own understanding and responded to what they thought it meant.

Now the child is responding not only to whatever they were originally trying to communicate, but also to the parent’s response to something they didn’t mean in the first place.

And in many instances, this is where the conversation goes off the rails and becomes something neither one of them intended.

How Children Make Sense of What They Know

For instance, there was this four-year-old who, during his nighttime tuck-in, informed his dad that he wasn’t his real dad. Mom was his real mom, but Dad wasn’t his real dad.

And Dad is sitting there thinking, Mmm, okay, but the child wasn’t finished.

Then the four-year-old proceeded to tell Dad that he was also old and was going to die soon. And when that happened, he was going to be put in a plastic bag, taken to the dump, and thrown away.

Dad is now understandably unnerved and absolutely wondering what exactly is happening in this child’s head.

And rightfully so.

But when someone stopped, asked a few more questions, and broke those statements down a bit farther, there were other pieces of information to connect behind all of it.

The family cat had recently died. The child had recently learned about death. The cat was old, the cat died, and when you get old, you die. They had just gone to the dump and thrown away a bunch of old and broken stuff. He knew that he had grown inside Mom’s belly, but he had definitely not grown inside Dad’s.

He was four and he was connecting the dots he had.

Research in developmental psychology tells us that children begin trying to figure out why things happen surprisingly early. From a very young age, they use what they already know to make sense of new information, predict what might happen next, and come up with explanations for things that don’t quite fit what they already understand. Starting as young as preschool, children will take new or unexpected information and search for an explanation that makes sense with what they already know.

Sometimes that means filling in the missing pieces themselves, even when it takes a pretty long stretch to get those dots to connect.

Kids are constantly trying to connect the dots in their world. Sometimes they have quite a few dots. Sometimes they only have three.

And sometimes three perfectly reasonable dots get Dad sent to the dump in a plastic bag.

And Sometimes It’s the Other Way Around

A preschooler whose father was seriously ill with cancer once drew a picture of his family, and in this drawing his dad looked extremely thin, like a skeleton.

The adults looking at the picture interpreted the very thin drawing of Dad as the child having drawn his dad as a skeleton.

Understandably, some of the adults around him were concerned. His dad was very sick. The adults knew what Dad’s cancer could mean. They knew he might die. They knew what losing a parent could mean for a child and could imagine the fear, the grief, the permanence, and how much this would change his life.

Was this picture a cry for help? Was Dad being as thin as a skeleton scaring this kid as much as it was concerning the adults looking at it? Was he frightened about his dad dying? Was there something happening emotionally that he needed help with?

Those were reasonable things to wonder about.

For an adult.

Until someone asked him.

“Does Dad look like a skeleton?”

Yes.

Then someone asked Mom, “Does Dad look really skinny, like a skeleton?”

“Yes, now that I think of it, he kind of does.”

Dad had become extremely thin from cancer and treatment.

The child had been asked to draw a picture of his family, and he drew his family as he saw them.

But that was the meaning the adults brought to the drawing.

The child knew Dad was sick. He also knew Dad had gotten really skinny.

And apparently, Dad kind of looked like a skeleton.

In research using “draw-and-tell” approaches with children, we see why asking matters. A child’s drawing can tell us quite a bit about what they see, think, or experience, but researchers don’t rely on the drawing alone. They also ask the child to explain it, giving them a chance to add the context and meaning that an adult looking at the picture might otherwise fill in for them.

Sometimes just asking one or two more questions can help us clarify what we think we know and what we are actually understanding before connecting our own meaning to what our child is trying to communicate.

More Dots, More Ways to Connect, More Ways for Misunderstanding

As kids get older, they have accumulated considerably more dots. And with more dots comes more information they can pull from when they are trying to make sense of what is happening around them.

This is part of what can make adolescents so confusing to the adults around them. They can understand complicated friendships and social dynamics, notice things adults miss, have surprisingly sophisticated conversations, and manage some remarkably complex situations—and then turn around and do something so spectacularly stupid that you cannot begin to understand how the same kid thought that was going to be okay.

All of this is happening while their brains are still developing the skills needed to manage increasing complexity, consider different perspectives, and make sense of experiences they often have very little previous experience navigating. Add stress, pressure, strong emotions, or a relatively new experience, and they still have to organize what they know and make sense of what is happening with the information, experience, and skills available to them in that moment.

So, just because your adolescent child has a sophisticated understanding or is highly capable in one situation doesn’t mean they will have the same depth of knowledge, experience, or skills available to them in another. They are still trying to organize what they know, connect the dots they have, and come to an understanding that makes sense to them from what is available right now.

Often on the fly and in the moment.

Something is happening to me right now. I need to understand what this means to me. I have all these dots available to me from throughout my life. Let me connect them into an understanding that makes sense to me, from who and where I am right now.

And sometimes the dots they connect can make complete sense from the information they have available and still take them spectacularly far afield from what actually happened, what someone meant, or what the situation required.

Which means that when a tween or teen says something that seems to come completely out of left field—or is suddenly “freaking out” about something that doesn’t seem to warrant quite that level of catastrophe—we may still need to ask a few questions before we understand how they got there.

Tweens.

I was talking with a twelve-year-old who was processing something her parents had told her. We were talking through it out loud: when she graduated from high school and became an adult, they wanted her to move out and live independently.

I could see her trying to make sense of this, so I asked why she thought her parents wanted her to move out.

She didn’t think long about it.

“Well, they pay taxes. They probably don’t want to pay my taxes anymore. They want me to pay my own taxes.”

Taxes.

I would have guessed groceries.

And taxes apparently made perfect sense to her. But something about the way her expression changed as we talked told me there was more she was trying to make sense of.

She was twelve. Eighteen was six years away, and her parents were already telling her that when she got there, they wanted her to leave.

She understood what they said.

What she didn’t have was all of the information that comes from the life between twelve and eighteen.

Middle school. High school. Increasing independence and responsibility. Graduating. Maybe college, a job, or whatever direction her life eventually took.

Her parents knew how much life and development would happen during those six years because they had already lived through them.

She hadn’t.

She understood them as giving her six years’ notice to vacate the premises.

If they loved her and liked having her around, why were they already talking about wanting her to leave?

That was the part she was actually trying to make sense of.

Her parents hadn’t told her they didn’t love her or didn’t want her around. They were talking about raising her to eventually become an independent adult and build a life of her own.

She heard what they said. She just didn’t have all of the life they had attached to what they said.

So somewhere between we want you to be able to live independently when you’re an adult and what she understood was a little bit of maybe they don’t want me here. And taxes.

Teens.

Think about a freshman who is just getting used to high school, adjusting to all the different classes, different teachers, a bigger student body, new responsibilities, more pressure, more stress. At the same time, he is receiving messages from everywhere about how much high school matters.

Grades matter. Colleges look at them. The habits you develop now matter. The choices you make in high school can affect your future.

Teachers say pieces of it. Parents say pieces of it. Other students say pieces of it. Social media adds more.

Nobody has to say all of those things together.

Now this freshman is struggling in math class.

He has all of that information, and now he is connecting those dots.

I’m struggling in math. If I get a bad grade, that will hurt my grades in high school. Colleges look at high-school grades. If my grades aren’t good enough, no college will want me. If I don’t go to college, I won’t get a good job. If I don’t get a good job, I won’t make enough money. And then, someday I won’t be able to support myself or my family. My wife, my children, and I are going to be homeless.

At fourteen.

Nobody told him he was going to be homeless. Nobody helped him arrange those dots in that order.

He put all of those pieces together with the information he had, and this is what made sense to him in that moment.

And the thing is, those dots weren’t necessarily wrong or irrelevant. Grades matter. High-school performance can affect college options. Education and work can affect opportunities later.

This freshman took all of the relevant information he had available and connected those dots in a way that made sense to him in that moment. What those connections didn’t include was the enormous amount of life, additional information, experience, and time between his freshman-year math class and his future wife and family being homeless. He was just missing that there is a whole lot of life still between those two points.

This Is Where Curiosity Helps

There may really be something underneath what a child says that needs our attention. They may need information they don’t have yet or have connected a few dots in a way we never would have considered.

We may also have noticed that we added a different meaning that wasn’t there at all.

And sometimes the thing is simply the thing.

Maybe what they said seems to come completely out of left field. Maybe their reaction doesn’t seem to match what you thought just happened and something isn’t quite lining up. This is where having a little curiosity helps.

Just ask:

“Help me understand this a little better.”

Or, when you are the one who said something and their response doesn’t seem to match what you thought you said:

“What did you think I just said?”

Not, “tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it,” or “let me explain why that isn’t true.” And it doesn’t have to be twenty questions until we uncover some hidden psychological meaning that may or may not even be there.

It is in these instances that being curious is just about noticing that there may be a mismatch between your interpretation and theirs and then checking whether the meaning you have assigned is the same as, or at least similar to, theirs.

Then let their answer tell you where to go next.

Sources & Further Reading

If you'd like to learn more about the research behind how children make sense of information, adolescent development, and parent-child communication, these are excellent places to start.

Eileen Grover
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