One of the most underrated words in parenting is a small one: "Hey, can I talk to you about something?" It is not a command, or a lecture, or an accusation. It is an invitation. It creates space, it softens certainty, and it opens a conversation instead of demanding compliance. Let me show you what I mean.
A friend of mine spent weeks agonizing over a single decision: whether to take her eighteen-year-old daughter along on a trip to the States to visit her own father, who needed looking after. Every day she circled the same questions. Will she enjoy it? Will she be bored? Will she resent coming? And if she does come, will I end up spending the whole trip caring for her instead of spending time with my father? She was trying to predict every outcome before she could make the "right" choice.
Eventually I suggested something different. What if you stop trying to decide for her? Paint the whole picture honestly, and then step back. Say, "Hey, do you have a minute?"
The next day she went to her daughter. "Hey, can I talk to you about something?" She described exactly what the trip might look like, the good parts, the hard parts, the uncertainty, and the real possibility that she would have to spend part of it caring for her own father. She shared her worries honestly, without steering her one way or the other. And then she stopped. She left space.
Her daughter took it all in and said, "I'd like to come." That was it. The decision belonged to the person who would actually live it, and they had a wonderful trip together.
The lesson was not simply that it worked out. It was that the mother could finally put down the impossible weight of predicting every feeling in advance. She explained honestly, laid out the options, answered the questions, and trusted her daughter to choose. She chose collaboration over control.
Another friend faced something harder. Her eighteen-year-old stepdaughter barely acknowledged her. Most days there was no greeting, little conversation. The distance had grown for years, and it was both painful and maddening. She kept replaying all the ways she had tried to connect, the art projects, the walks, the talks, and it all felt useless now. She could feel, clearly, that her stepdaughter disliked her, maybe even hated her, and she had begun to feel like a stranger in her own home.
Finally she decided to risk honesty. She walked to her stepdaughter's room and began with the same words. "Hey, can I talk to you about something?"
Instead of accusing, she made herself vulnerable. She said she had felt the distance growing for a long time. She wasn't trying to replace her mother. More than anything, she simply hoped for a relationship built on mutual respect. She told her how grateful she was to have her in her life, and how much she hoped that one day her stepdaughter might reach toward her, rest her head on her shoulder, ask her something about her life.
By the end, they were both crying and holding each other. The quiet, guarded teenager finally said, "I thought you didn't like me." Years of misunderstanding dissolved in a single conversation.
Not every hard conversation ends in tears and reconciliation. But congruence, sharing our real feelings with kindness and responsibility, makes it possible. We don't dump our emotions on someone or use them as a weapon. We share our experience honestly, and that honesty invites the other person to do the same. Real sharing draws out real sharing. It is a two-way street.
There are names for what these two mothers did. The psychologist Carl Rogers called it congruence, when our outside matches our inside, when we stop hiding behind roles or pretending everything is fine and simply become genuine. Rogers paired it with what he called unconditional positive regard, the sense that a person has worth even when we disagree with them. Teenagers can nearly always feel the difference between being accepted as a person and being evaluated for their behavior.
Ross Greene, who developed the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions approach, puts a companion idea more plainly: kids do well if they can. He nudges us away from "How do I get my teenager to comply?" toward "How do we understand each other well enough to solve this together?" And the quiet irony is that when teenagers are invited into the decisions that affect them, they tend to rise, becoming more responsible, not less. Collaboration tells a child, I trust that your perspective matters. Congruence tells them, I can be real with you, and you can be real with me.
These ideas feel especially close during Elul. Elul is a month of return, and much of that return is not between a person and HaShem alone. It happens between people, and it usually begins with one honest conversation. Jewish life has always known that brokenness is never the final chapter, and that repair happens inside relationships, one honest conversation at a time.
Perhaps that is why this belongs to Aharon HaKohen. His name is the same letters as Aron, the holy Ark, with one letter added inside: a Hey. He was the great repairer of relationships, the one who reopened the channels between people who had stopped speaking. And the letter Hey is itself open, unenclosed on two sides, a two-way street. It reminds us that repair begins not with assertion but with openness, with movement in both directions. We speak honestly, we listen with curiosity, and together we make enough room for understanding to return.
A real "Hey" is quietly asking: Can we begin again? Can I share what is happening inside me? Can I hear what is happening inside you? Can we repair what has quietly grown between us?
So perhaps our teenagers do not always need another limit. Perhaps they need another invitation. "Hey, can I tell you what I've been thinking about?" "Hey, I'd really like to hear what you think." "Hey, can we figure this out together?"
Small words, carrying something much larger. I see you. I respect you. I trust you enough to tell you the truth, and enough to hear yours. Little by little, we begin to treat our teenagers as the young adults they are becoming, people who can think, choose, repair, and build. And sometimes reconnection begins with one small word.
Hey.