When Parents Don't Show Curiosity About Your Life

Family relationships are harder today because everyone is living a completely different life. And most of us weren't taught to deal with it. We were taught that family just works, that understanding each other is supposed to come naturally because you share a last name, or a dinner table, or a set of memories from childhood. But family has always required some sort of consistent negotiation. People are at different life stages, going through different things, and it's hard for everyone in the system to understand one another. But for a long time, the elders and the family set the tone. They dictated how the family operated, and it really didn't matter if they understood the younger generation. What mattered most was that the younger generation followed. And honestly, this worked for a while, and it continues to work in a lot of families where everyone follows the same script, which might be something like getting married, having kids, similar jobs, taking a similar path. You understood what your family was going through, because you went through it too. But that script really doesn't exist anymore for most families. More people today are unmarried, cohabitating, child-free, women are in the workforce, maybe, as the main breadwinner for the first time in their family history. We have dad staying at home with kids, and there are family formations that are completely outside the lived experience of older generations. Now, everyone has to actually do the work to get to know each other as real people, not just family roles. Now, when everyone used to follow the same script, no one had to ask what your life was like. They assumed that they already knew. There was no need to develop that muscle. I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and today we're talking about curiosity in families. We're going to talk about why so many of you feel misunderstood by your families, especially if you're younger, doing something different, or doing the same things in a different order. We'll also talk about why this hurts so much, even when your parents or the people in your family aren't doing anything malicious. What it's like to grow up with a parent who only asks questions to gather evidence, what the research says is actually happening when we don't feel known by the people who are supposed to know us and how to build this skill. Because curiosity is a skill and you can learn it before we get into this. If anything in this episode hits home or you're looking to build this skill even more, you should join us inside the Family Cycle Workers Club at Calling Home. It's a membership community I build for adults who are tired of carrying their families' patterns alone. With support groups, weekly resources and scripts for the hardest conversations you don't know how to have, a whole community of people who get it is waiting for you at CallingHome.co. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode. I posted a video recently asking a simple question, and I recorded this just like randomly while I was sitting rocking my baby in the chair, and I asked, "Do your parents express curiosity about your life?" And that post on TikTok alone got almost 13,000 likes and has 1800 comments and growing. And I want to read you some of them because I think they'll do something that the research on this can't quite do. They'll let you know that whatever you're feeling, you're absolutely not the only one feeling it. So here's some things people said to that question. Nope, they will call to talk to me about themselves for an hour, and if I try to tell them anything about mine, they can't get off the phone fast enough. I'm an accessory in an idea, not a person. My parents are interested in the parts they can get accolades for. They don't ask. I know they care at least a little bit, but they don't really know or ask. My mom will ask, and if I reply, honestly, she cuts me off to talk about herself. My dad has not asked me a meaningful question about my life in three years. I can't even remember the last time my parents asked me a single question about my life. Mine wants to control my life still. My Boomer parents have never had real curiosity about me, and especially as an adult. All conversations were limited to specific topics that would not make my parents uncomfortable in any way, and made them feel good. Nothing deeper or that had anything to do with my internal world. What I think about things, my friends, what I actually do with my free time. Zero curiosity expressed by my Boomer parents. They have literally no clue what's going on in my life, and that comment got almost 1300 likes. My parents are the least interested people in their own daughter's life. I have acquaintances that know more about me than my parents. You get the drill. There's a lot of comments here. Almost 2000 of you wrote some version of these. Now the comments cluster here into some really specific patterns that I want to break down, because I think a lot of you have been told that what you're describing is like a communication style, or they just love you in their own way, but I want to name what's actually happening here. One of the patterns is that the people in your family, this was mainly about parents, but like that they are a monologue or they call to talk, not to connect, and their conversation is really structured around them. Their week, their stress, their grievances, and like you are an audience to that, not a participant in the conversation. And people said things like my parents just kind of talk at me. My mom might ask one simple question and then talk about herself and her life for the next 20 to 30 minutes. And this person typically needs you to listen, but they can't return the gesture. Then there's another pattern that I'm calling like the surface skimmer. The person who just stays on the surface. They ask that the questions are shallow and very procedural, right? So how's work? How are the kids? What's new? It's always superficial and nothing deep. One person in the comments said they asked the same questions over and over that were service level like how's work? Are you dating anyone? What's new? And this is the person who maybe wants to form connection without doing the work of the connection or they really don't know how or they think that this is connection. This one can be tough to identify. There's also a lot of cutoffs happening here. That's another pattern. So they ask and then when you answer honestly, they redirect. So like I get someone said I get one question about my week and then it immediately gets turned into what she's been doing and all her ideas about what she wants to do. It's really disappointing and makes me not want to answer the phone when she calls anymore. Someone else said if I let something slip about my life, it's met with kind of huh. So anyway, back to talking about me. This person tends to like deliberately cut you off and bring it back to them or it's like they're leaving the conversation. You're kind of trailing off mid sentence. It's that type of pattern. There's also a lot of people that spoke about like being frozen in time. So your family member or your parent is curious about a version of you that no longer exists. So that might be you in high school before you got married, before you came out, before you left the church, before you moved away. And they ask about people. They remember from like your wedding or college, but nothing about current you or someone commented that they only ask about the me that they liked better. I feel like they think I'm still the same as when I was 15. And this parent often isn't asking these questions because maybe they think they already know the answer. They liked that other version of you. They have not been able to allow you to grow into someone new in their mind. A lot of you also spoke about parents or family members that only want to hear about the parts of your life that they can brag about or take credit for. So like your promotion engagement, baby, they're not curious about anything else about you. The curiosity and the service of their own image, not yours. And this is another one that's hard to identify. Someone else, another pattern that I noticed was like the the person that's always saying like, I hope there were so many comments like this. Like my mother hopes very often. Hope you're doing well. Hope the weather is nice. Hope you're having fun, but she never actually asks me anything directly. Like this is your performing care and you're talking to someone, but it's not actually a question. It doesn't require an answer. It's like just like a gesture. And when that's the only type of interaction you're having with someone, it can feel very shallow. A lot of you also talked about their being as script. So this comment said, my mom asks me the same four to five questions like a script that I get the questions over and over every time we have the same singular conversation. And it feels like they're going through the motions or like they've identified a small set of safe questions and they kind of cycle through them like a checklist and you don't feel like there's any connection. And then the last pattern, you know, is definitely more of a weaponization and more of like a dangerous type of like more abusive pattern when the parent or family member is asking you questions because they're gathering information to use it against you to control the narrative or to take it to other family members. And one commenter said this perfectly. There's a big difference between asking questions and genuine curiosity. Asking questions can be a form of control based on what the questions are and what the person does with that information. Sometimes people want to know more about you because they care and sometimes they want to know so they can compare metal, distort, sabotage, insult and use things against you. And that comes I think a lot of people are living with this and you know that the function of the question or the curiosity is not to get to know you. It's like to track you or to surveil you and you probably have learned that being honest has a cost. I'm naming all of these patterns because I think a lot of you have been told that what you're experiencing is not a big deal. It's just how they are and even as I was coming across these, I started to feel this feeling of like, "Oh well, I feel kind of bad for the parents." Like I know even with me with my son sometimes after school, I'm like, "Man, I'm asking the same questions. Like I need to get more creative. Maybe I should just sit here in silence." Like we can get really stressed about the questions that we choose to ask people and if you're married, you might notice like the person you're partnered with just comes home and asks you the same question every day or asks you in the morning. Like so how'd you sleep and you just get on this like robotic path and it's not necessarily nefarious or something that you're trying to do on purpose but you get sucked into it. But what you're picking up on is often a real observable pattern and I think there's a big difference between someone who is, who loves you and is curious about you and someone who loves the idea of you and when someone is genuinely curious about you, you also don't always need them to ask all the questions. Why does this hurt so much? Even when your parents or your family members aren't doing something like overtly cruel? This hurts because being asked about ourselves and being known is not a luxury. It's a fundamental human need that keeps us connected in relationships. And when people are responsive to us when they care when they try to connect, they try to understand, validate and they care about us, these components allow intimacy to grow. And when they're absent, it doesn't matter how much someone says they love you, you can't experience real closeness. So when people don't experience responsiveness, they become less open, they expect less acceptance and they feel less safe in the relationship. And so the relationship can still technically exist but it will feel profoundly empty. Now when you grow up with a parent who is absent or very self-focused, this is also a form of childhood emotional neglect. And the research on this has been clear for over a decade that childhood emotional neglect is associated with depression, anxiety, social anxiety, relationship difficulties and difficulties trusting others in adulthood. So when you have this feeling of like, well, my parent wasn't abusive, they were just kind of disinterested, but you can't figure out why you're struggling so much and why you feel the way you feel. That is still an injury. It's not that nothing happened. It's that the thing that was supposed to happen, like them showing curiosity into your life, attending to you, comprehending you, being connected with you didn't happen. And that is a form of neglect. For those of you who your parents or your family members have weaponized information, the dynamic is different, but it can still feel very much like this form of neglect or not being known. So in one case, you're learning that being known wasn't available and in the other, you're learning that being known wasn't safe. But both teach the same lesson. Don't be honest with this person. I cannot share because they're either going to use it against me or they're not even going to be there and they're not going to hear me. We also have some pretty good research on curiosity itself and the act of being curious is a predictor of intimacy in the relationship science literature. So across multiple studies, it's been found that highly curious people generate closeness in their relationships regardless of the context. So even in small talk situations, they create intimacy. And people who are not curious only feel close when someone else is doing the work for them. And you've probably heard or experienced this, that like the best way to create small talk with someone or to have conversations is to ask questions about people, right? And being interested in someone is what helps cultivate a relationship. It's much more important that you are interested in others than you come across as interesting. So you might be talking to someone, maybe even your parent or your family member, who is interesting. They have a lot of stories. They have lots of opinions. They have so much to say, but they are not interested in you. And so that doesn't feel like a real conversation. Because being interesting is not the same thing as being curious. And you can be the most interesting person on the planet who's had like this really amazing life. And it's still not going to produce closeness. There's another framework that helps explain this as well. And it's called the family communication patterns theory. And in this theory, they distinguish between two dimensions of family communication. One is conversation orientation. So how openly and frequently a family talks about a wide range of topics. And the other is conformity orientation. How much the family emphasizes agreement and hierarchy. So families that run high on conformity and low on conversation used to function fine, right? Like we talked about at the beginning of the episode because everyone was following the same script anyways. You didn't have to talk about who you were because that was already decided. But when you look at this research, adults who grow up in high conversation orientation family, so families that talk about a wide range of topics are more emotionally intelligent, are skilled at self-disclosure, and better at maintaining their close relationships across the board. So what we're looking at today is a large amount of a generation of parents who were raised in high conformity families who never had to develop conversation as a skill. And now they're trying to parent and maybe partner with people whose lives don't fit that old script. And it's not working. And it's probably not because they don't love their kids or want to know them, the majority of them, but because they never built that muscle. I also think that a lot of these people were raised in families where children weren't asked about, maybe grew up in homes where children were seen and not heard or where the elders really set the tone. And the kids were not asked about their inner lives. And so they never developed a model for asking about anyone else's or they're not even sure that they're supposed to. Some of these people are not able to give what they didn't receive because they haven't done the conscious work to work on that. A lot of this comes down to emotional immaturity as well, right? Some parents are simply self-focused in a way that doesn't shift with age. And there are 30-year-olds who are deeply curious about other people and there are 70-year-olds who can't do it. And age doesn't fix this. Emotional growth is what would fix it. And that's not something that everybody learns. It's not a choice that everyone makes. In a lot of these relationships, the relationship was also always one directional. So the parent positioned themselves as the center of the system from day one. The child was the audience, the helper, the confidant, or they were just an extension of the parent's identity. And so when that child grows up and becomes a separate person with a separate life, the parent doesn't know how to relate to them as anything else. I think also some parents really avoid asking real questions because they're afraid of the answers. They may not want to know that you're struggling because it would make them feel uncomfortable. They don't want to know that you've changed a comment or said that conversations were limited to topics that would not make my parents uncomfortable in any way and would just make them feel good. And so surface questions can be a defense mechanism. If we keep it light, then no one has to deal with anything happy. The other theory here is that curiosity exists in some families, but only as control. And so for those of you that have people in your family or parents that only ask questions with an agenda, a lot of those parents never learned that other people are separate humans who's interlives belong to them, not to the family or to the parent. And so that information becomes leverage in their model of the world. That's what information is for. And this is a much harder pattern to repair. And it's honestly the one that I would encourage you to kind of lower your expectations about if you're experiencing that. Now I think some of you are listening to this and thinking, okay, I see these patterns, but what are families doing that are getting this right? And a lot of people in the comments named it because they were comparing their own family of origin to maybe their in law or their partner's family. And one commenter wrote, my partner's parents are genuinely always so curious about my life, my job, what is new and are always the first to notice a change. You got a haircut. It looks so good. I first completely threw me off, but through therapy I realized it is not normal to be able to mute yourself for 30 plus minutes while one or both of my parents call me. Both sets of parents are the same age, but my partner's parents must have put in a lot more effort. Another person said, I didn't realize how much was missing until my in laws were introduced into my life and they take so much interest in everything I've done. I do, it's crazy. Another person said, "I chat with my mom a few times a week. She likes to know how my work, my husband, and the dogs are. She even remembers things I forgot I brought up a week before." She asks how my various friends are and keeps track of co-workers. Someone else said, "I have a wonderful relationship with my parents and I can confidently say that my mom often asks questions about my life and about my past experience, reflecting on how validating it feels when my mom says things like, 'That was a hard time for our family. What do you remember about that time? It effect you is so meaningful." What are these families and these people doing right? One thing they're doing is they're noticing changes. They're registering that you got a haircut, you seem tired, your voice sounds different, and curiosity has to come from attention. People who are good at this are paying attention and they're noticing things. They also remember what you told them. They're not asking the same five questions on a loop. They bring up things you said weeks ago and they are trying to build a relationship with you and they're scaffolding that relationship with more information and attention and updating their knowledge of you. Now of course people are going to forget things and not always be on top of things but you're noticing that they are trying this. They also ask follow-up questions. A follow-up is built on something that you just said and it signals that you're listening. When you say like what did you end up deciding about that or why did that bother you so much? Survey questions are interchangeable but a follow-up question is specific to you and what you've been sharing. They also ask depth-oriented versions of small questions. I think that asking things that show that you are curious instead of just like how was your day, remembering something about their day, asking if anything was hard during their day or if they liked anything about their day. You have the same kind of form of question but you're trying to get underneath and show more depth and interest than just like how was your day, how was work and getting a little bit more curious and this takes effort. It's hard or you have to think of these things and show that you care and that you're paying attention. I think when we're talking about intergenerational relationships and families too, it's important that the older person is asking about things from the past and not just the present or about today. That comment earlier where they brought up, their parents saying like that was a hard time for our family. What do you remember about it? How did it affect you? They're saying like I am curious about your history with me. I want to know how you experience things and this helps change and deepen the relationship. I think when you're getting to know someone, you're talking about their past, how they experience things, what they were like in high school, what they did as a kid, that can be very helpful. They also tolerate the answer. This is a really big one. People that are very good at this, they don't change the subject, they don't redirect, they're not correcting you, they don't make the answer all about them. They're able to sit with what you said long enough to make it feel like they actually heard you. They bring you to this moment of feeling understood, validated and cared for. This is the difference between a question that connects and a question that's just being asked to say that you asked it. The other thing that these families and these relationships are doing very well is they allow the version they have of you to be updated in their mind so they don't operate from a frozen model of you. They ask about your current self, what you're into now, what you've changed, what your life looks like this year, instead of just relating to you as like a 17 year old or a five year old. The other thing we talked about a lot is that they ask without an agenda, they're not gathering ammunition, they're not collecting information to bring up later, they're not trying to confirm something negative about you that they've already decided is true. They really just want to get to know you and connect with you. The last one that is very important is that they repair when they mess up. When a parent who is trying notices that they cut you off or they haven't asked about you in a while, they've been making everything about them, they come back and say like, "Oh, sorry, I didn't ask you how you've been. I've been really caught up in this thing that's going on for me. I've been stressed, I want to check in with you." They make it known that they care about you, they notice they're paying attention and they want to connect. I want to give a quick note to the parents listening. I mentioned that this can even be like a stressful thing for me to think about. I know some of you are here because you're worried this is you. I always say the fact that you're asking this question is the first step and a lot of parents never ask it. I ask the questions, I know I'm good, I don't care. I don't need any lessons about being curious. You don't need to have been curious to become curious. It's a learnable skill. You can start by just focusing on one follow up question per phone call. Notice one thing about them that's changed and ask about it, but please make sure that it is that you're noticing something kind and positive, not that you're trying to point out something negative about them that you want to change. When they answer, don't redirect, don't correct them and try not to bring it back to yourself. Just stay with what they said for 30 seconds more than what feels like a reflex for you. I also want to name what's at stake if you don't do this work. A lot of the comments that I got on these posts ended with some version of like I haven't spoken to my dad in three months. I stopped reaching out. It's been a year now. I think that what was really overwhelmingly obvious in these comments sections is that these adults are telling you they need more curiosity from you. The absence of that is ending these relationships. I think people will tolerate a lot from a parent who is genuinely trying to know them. They will tolerate very little from a parent who is not. There are of course going to be seasons in life where it is harder to be curious with your child and to connect with them. There are ways to still show that you are trying to know them and be connected with them. If there's one thing that you take from this episode, I want you to know that families really need curiosity. They need to feel this feeling of I want to understand you. I want to know what your life is like even if your life looks nothing like mine. That effort to understand is what makes us feel close and that is what's going to create solid family relationships. If you didn't grow up with that and you're listening right now and realizing your family never asked, never tried or only asked so they could use it against you later, it makes sense that you're grieving that. Wanting to be asked about is not too much. It's not needy. It's honestly one of the most well documented human needs in the relationship science literature. The need to be understood, validated and cared for by the people who are supposed to know you. If you didn't get that, the pain you're feeling is real. If you're a parent or a partner who wasn't taught how to do this, the good news is you can learn it. You can build this muscle. You can start tonight at dinner with one follow-up question and you can keep going from there. As always, if this episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. If you're ready to actually work on this and you're tired of waiting for your family to figure it out, you're ready to be the one who breaks the pattern. Come join us inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. You'll get our support groups, weekly articles, how do I say this, scripts, worksheets and a community of cycle breakers working on the exact things we talked about today. Head to callinghome.co to join or click the link in the show notes. If you have a question for the show, you can leave a voice mail at 866-225-5466 or email me at [email protected]. I'll be back next week. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice or qualified healthcare provider and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and calling home or wittie goodman. For more information on this, please see calling home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.