- When I pick up my two teens from school all their answers are one word.
- I now ask them the same three questions every day during dinner.
- We focus on how they were kind and brave and how they failed at something.
Every day, I pick up my teens from school. As soon as their bags are thrown onto the floor and they’re buckled in their seats, I ask them about their day. Inevitably, the answer is one word: good.
I try again and ask more specific, open-ended questions, like, “How was your math test, or did anything fun happen at lunch?” The answer, again, is “good.” Sometimes, if they’re feeling verbose, they say, “I don’t know.” All in all, by the time we get home, I have no more information about their day than I did before pick up.
Then dinner rolls around, and thanks to three specific questions about kindness, bravery, and failure, “good” is nowhere to be found.
I ask the same questions every night
The questions came into my life by chance. Many years ago, I got into an intense conversation with a parent of older kids. We talked about how he was struggling to connect with his teens and how they were beginning to act out. He told me about a technique that he was trying that involved asking your teens the same three questions every night to encourage them to find in themselves qualities like kindness, bravery, humility, and determination.
The next day, fearful of the day my little kids would become teenagers who would pull away and possibly act out, I announced that we had a new dinnertime tradition.
At dinner that night I asked them: what did you do today that was kind? What did you do today that was brave? What did you do today that you failed at (and either can work harder on or are proud of your effort)?
I can’t remember how they answered or if they answered on that first night. I only remember the first few months of asking the questions, I often helped prompt answers, reminding them of the kind thing I saw them do or the thing they did that they didn’t even realize was brave, in that small quiet way truly brave things tend to be.
They became part of our routine
Soon, they started helping each other find answers to the questions, and within months, the questions were integrated into our dinner routine. They started reminding me that it was time for “kind, brave, fail” — the shorthand way we began to refer to our dinner conversation starter.
Months after that, the questions started to evolve. My kids found that it was hard to think of something brave every day, so on the days they drew a blank, they started sharing something they’d accomplished that day that they were proud of. After one Thanksgiving, they decided to include “What are you grateful for today?” in their daily routine, and the answers have ranged anything from being grateful for Fortnite to being grateful for a safe space during a whirlwind day.
Most days, when they were little, we didn’t make it through everyone answering all the questions. In answering what she did that was kind, my daughter’s story about the friend she held the door for turned into a discussion of friendships and relationships. Or in talking about something brave that he did, my son’s story about the rude substitute had us delving into the “hows” and “whys” and details of his day — details that didn’t come out when I asked, “How was your day” just a few hours earlier.
I feel like an outsider in their world
These days, our nights look different than they did all those years ago. My kids’ lives are busier now that they are full-blown teens. Between changing family dynamics, soccer practices, and tennis matches, volunteering commitments and clubs, homework and friends, there are days when I feel like I barely see them at all, and I feel like an outsider to the worlds they’re building for themselves—not unlike the older parent I spoke to all those years ago.
And then a dinner together and “kind, brave, and fail.”
Like magic words, my teens share all the parts of the day that “good” had hidden.
To be clear, the magic isn’t in the words, not in the questions themselves — though there is certainly value in reminding teens to look for the ways they exemplify kindness, courage, and determination in their days. Rather, the magic — the way those questions elicit enthusiastic stories, the way they bring us all back into the same world, at least for a little while — is from something else. The joy of a tradition. The comfort of familiarity. The safety of a connection to a time that was just ours.
