A couple came to a coaching call a few weeks ago with all the feelings. Their kid leaves for college next fall and they feel very aware that this is the last full summer with him home. They had quietly built a whole architecture around it: a big trip, dinners, conversations they’d been saving. And their kid, three weeks into break, mostly wanted to be horizontal on the couch with his phone, off with friends every spare moment, and monosyllabic at dinner. The parents weren’t angry. They were hurt. “We keep thinking, does he not want this time with us? Doesn’t he know it’s almost over?”
I want to offer you what I offered them, because I suspect some version of this is happening in your house too: the silence is not about you. And the couch is not a rejection. It’s actually the point of summer.
Ron Dahl’s research on the adolescent brain shows that at the onset of puberty, the brain reorganizes around social belonging, and this continues well into the early 20s. Being seen, evaluated, and ranked becomes neurologically expensive in a way it simply wasn’t at nine. Think of it as a social tax. School charges it. Friends charge it. The group chat charges it around the clock. For a rising senior, add the college process, where every conversation about the future doubles as an assessment. Your kid has spent 10 months paying that tax daily, and summer is the first time the bill stops arriving.
So, when they disappear into their room or melt into the couch, they are not withdrawing from you. They are doing the adolescent equivalent of taking off shoes that pinched all year. And here is the part that changed things for the couple I work with: Kids only let themselves go that slack in places that feel safe. The performance version of your kid, the funny, engaged, presentable one, goes to school and to their friends because those audiences require it. You get the unedited version because you’re the one audience that doesn’t. The couch rot you’re personalizing is, in a real way, a compliment.
That doesn’t mean summer becomes a silent film. It means you stop trying to schedule connection like it’s another enrichment activity and let it arrive on the schedule rest makes possible. A rested nervous system is one that has something left over, and the leftover is where the good conversations come from. Every parent knows this pattern already: The kid says nothing for four days and then, at 11 at night or in minute 40 of a drive, opens up about something real. That wasn’t random; that was a kid whose social account finally had a surplus.
Here is the one thing to try. Let the rot run a little longer than you’re comfortable with, and instead of prying them off the couch, join the low-stakes moments already happening. Sit nearby with your own book. Take the errand together without an agenda. And when they finally offer something, receive it without converting it into a college conversation or a life lesson. “Huh, tell me more,” is a complete response. The first thing they hand you is a test of what happens to the second thing.
You have not lost the last summer. It just doesn’t look like the one you planned. It looks like a kid resting somewhere they feel safe enough to be boring.
I work with parents of teenagers who are in exactly this kind of season. If something here resonated and you want to think it through for your specific family, I’d love to talk. You can book a call with me here.
Until next month,
Meg
