When my teen daughter refused to go to school, I was shocked and terrified. Most mornings, she refused to get out of bed. On the rare days when she agreed to get in the car, I’d drive her to school, drop her off right out front, watch her go inside the door, and I’d still hear from the school that she never showed up for class.

My husband and I yelled at her, we threatened her with all kinds of consequences. We grounded her, we took her phone away. We told her what would happen if she didn’t graduate high school: she’d never get a job, she’d be homeless. We started family therapy, but she wouldn’t show up for sessions. She wouldn’t show up for her orthodontist appointments or tutoring. I had two other kids who managed to make it to school every day. I couldn’t understand what was wrong.

My husband and I received letters that we were breaking the law in California by my daughter’s truancy and we could face consequences including criminal penalties. I’m guessing that law was created as an attempt to hold parents accountable for their children’s behavior, to prevent neglect but I can’t really see how that strategy would be effective. School refusal is deep, complicated behavior and trying to threaten parents into “fixing it” is as useless as me telling my daughter she was going to be homeless.

My family is pretty much the opposite of first-generation college students. We’re more like fourth-generation Ivy League. It never occurred to me that my daughter wouldn’t go to college, not to mention high school. The next years of our lives involved me looking deeply at, and questioning, my own views about what “success” is and what “safety” is. Have you heard that story about the two young fish who are swimming along and the older fish swims by them and says, “Hey boys, isn’t the water great today?” (always “boys” as told to me) and the young fish says to the other, “What’s water?”

So much of my family’s recovery—and it is our whole family as a system, not only my daughter—has been my husband and me, slowly, painfully, recognizing the water we swim in. I couldn’t see the system because I was so entrenched in it. My daughter is thriving now, but key to her health was me learning how to listen to her and not tell her what to do. Traditional school did not work for her. She got her GED and then community college and now she’s looking into how she wants, if she wants, to finish up. I’m following her lead.

Over the years, my daughter had access to all kinds of mental health treatment including wilderness therapy, residential therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, family therapy, hospital stays, psychiatry, and a seemingly endless rotation of medications. I realize how “privileged” we are that she had this kind of “support.” Other kids with the same behaviors—school refusal, drug use, stealing—with fewer resources would’ve ended up in the criminal justice system. But our family story can’t be simplified into criminal justice system bad, mental health system good. In many ways, my daughter’s treatment made things worse, got her sicker, and listening to so many experts, I lost touch with my own intuition.

The modality that transformed our family is Nonviolent Communication. My husband and I learned how to actually listen to my daughter. Nonviolent Communication teaches that feelings point to needs and all human behavior is motivated by an attempt to meet these needs. With an NVC lens, my daughter’s behaviors of school refusal, stealing, and drug abuse were adaptive strategies to meet needs including needs for safety, autonomy, mattering, and belonging. NVC teaches that most people get into conflict over strategies, not needs. When you get in touch with needs, it’s easier to access compassion for yourself and others, and to come up with new, creative, collaborative strategies to meet those needs. (I posted Kids Speak in Metaphor—Can Parents Listen for What Matters? with more detail about how I started to slowly learn listen to my daughter, and I’m still learning.)

In the video linked above that my daughter and I made yesterday, she says:

“I’m definitely very ADHD, so it was sort of an impossible, miserable, and physically painful task to be expected to be expected to sit and write for 8 hours a day. I never felt like I couldn’t keep up with school workwise but it was a totally miserable experience, and there were so many things in my mind that I would rather do or I thought would benefit me more.”

She also says:

“I didn’t really enjoy being a teenager that much or even like, a kid. I didn’t really like being told what to do and there’s like an inherent power imbalance with a parent and a child and I think that was just hard for me to deal with. I was just a very spirited child, very free-willed so I think I thrive a lot more as an adult, just in general, every aspect of it, having my own apartment, being able to decide what to do with time, not having to show up for school and sit down for 8 hours a day.”

One strategy that “worked” for my daughter was pursuing her GED. Another is online school. Underlying all of these strategies in my role is my priority to connect instead of fix. I can’t fix. With that stunning realization, again and again, over the years and still today, because I forget and then remember and then forget, comes so much grief, hope, humility, openness, clarity, creativity, growth, and joy.

If you want to learn more about NVC, go to my site, there are free resources including Feelings and Needs lists