How journaling with my teen brought us closer than I expected

My daughter was fourteen when she started answering my questions with single syllables and disappearing into her room the moment she got home from school. I found myself missing the girl who used to chatter about her friends on the drive back from netball practice, and I wondered whether this was just the normal push and pull of adolescence or something I was doing wrong. A friend from our church group in Brisbane suggested I try something radical: sit down with a notebook, pass it back and forth, and write instead of talk.

I was hesitant at first, mostly because my own attempts at conversation were ending in eye rolls and door slams. But I bought a plain A5 notebook from the newsagent near Westfield Carindale, picked up a couple of nice pens, and placed it on the kitchen counter with a note that simply said "if you ever want to". She didn't touch it for a week. Then, one Tuesday afternoon, I found a response tucked inside.

When I realised something had to change

There were a few moments that pushed me toward the idea of journaling with my teen. The first was overhearing her on the phone with her best friend, laughing about something I had clearly misunderstood the night before. The second was watching her scroll through TikTok for hours while our conversations sat untouched. The third was the quiet dread I felt when I realised I was turning into the parent I always said I would not be, the one whose kids eventually stop talking to.

I had always prided myself on being approachable. My own mum had been wonderfully warm but quite reserved, and I swore I would do things differently. So when I felt the distance growing, I took it personally. I read parenting books, scrolled through forums, and even bookmarked a piece about saying I'm sorry to my kids that made me cry in front of the kettle. None of it gave me the bridge I needed.

It wasn't until a Saturday morning at the markets in South Bank, while sipping coffee with a friend who homeschools four kids in regional Queensland, that I heard the word co-journaling for the first time. She described how she and her twelve year old had used a shared notebook during a particularly rough patch, passing it back and forth each evening, and how the practice had rescued their connection. Something about her description felt like permission to try something gentler than a confrontation.

Setting up our shared notebook

We did not make a big production out of it. I bought a soft covered journal from a small stationery shop in the Brisbane CBD, picked a bright yellow one because it reminded me of the wattle blooming outside our back door in spring, and placed it on the breakfast bench alongside a packet of coloured pens. There was no speech, no sit down talk, no contract. I simply wrote the first entry one evening after dinner and left the book open on her desk.

The rule, if you could call it a rule, was simple: write whatever you want, when you want. No reading each other's pages out loud. No correcting grammar. No requirement to respond. I told her she was allowed to ignore it entirely if she wanted, and that I would not bring it up again. The first week passed without any response at all, and I started to think it had been a beautiful idea that simply would not take root in our particular soil.

Then on a Thursday evening, after a long day at school where she had bombed a maths test, I found a single sentence written beneath my opening entry: today was rubbish but thanks for leaving me space. It wasn't exactly a paragraph, but it was the first sign that the pen was being picked up. Within a fortnight we had a small ritual of writing after dinner while the dishwasher hummed through its cycle and the magpies started their evening chorus outside.

What we end up writing about

The topics surprised me. I had assumed we would stick to surface things, what happened at school, who said what in the playground, complaints about homework and teachers. Instead, the notebook became a place where she processed the things she did not have words for out loud. She wrote about feeling pressure to look a certain way after scrolling through influencers. She wrote about her Christian faith and how she was not sure she believed everything she had been raised with. She wrote about her friendships, the crushes she did not quite have, the worry she carried about her grandmother's health in Adelaide.

I wrote back honestly. I wrote about my own doubts, my own faith journey, the times I lost my temper and regretted it. I wrote about my marriage and how my husband and I were navigating our own quiet shifts, including the way I had stopped comparing my relationship to what I see on social media and started seeing him as he actually was. Sometimes my responses were just questions. Sometimes they were a list of things I loved about her, written in the kind of language I would have been far too awkward to say out loud across the dinner table.

There were moments of honesty too. She once wrote that I embarrassed her by talking too loudly at school pickup in front of her friends. Another time she told me that I had been right about something and it had annoyed her. I wrote back apologising for the school pickup volume. She replied that she forgave me but asked me to please never wear the green jacket again. We laughed about the jacket later, and I think that laughter, written rather than spoken, carried a softness that face to face conversations rarely achieve.

The shifts I did not expect

I expected to learn more about her. I did not expect to learn more about myself. Reading her words, week after week, I started seeing patterns in my own behaviour that I had been blind to. I noticed how often I deflected her emotions with solutions instead of listening. I noticed how rarely I asked her questions that did not have a right answer. The notebook held a mirror up to me in a way no parenting book ever had, because her words came back to me unfiltered, without the politeness of spoken dialogue.

There were tangible shifts too. The single syllable answers at dinner slowly lengthened into sentences. She started coming to me with proper questions again, sometimes even seeking advice about friendships and faith. She began to invite me into her world in small ways, sharing a meme she liked, asking what I thought about a song she had discovered, walking with me to pick up bread from the IGA on Saturday mornings. None of these moments felt like breakthroughs at the time, but looking back, they are unmistakable.

The biggest shift, perhaps, was in the way I held her growing up. I had been holding on too tightly, partly because I was afraid of losing the connection, and partly because I knew that the teenage years pull kids away regardless of what a parent does. The journal gave me permission to loosen my grip. I did not need to chase her down the hallway or interrogate her about her day. The notebook waited patiently on the bench, and so did I.

When faith made its way onto the paper

Faith has always been part of how I parent, but I had been nervous about layering it into our journal. I did not want to turn our shared space into a sermon or a checklist. So instead of writing prayers and Bible references, I simply wrote honestly about my own walk. I wrote about the verses that had comforted me that week. I wrote about the questions I was wrestling with about church, about community, about what it meant to follow Jesus in the middle of suburbia.

She wrote back in surprising ways. She asked me once why we still went to church when so many of her friends did not, and I gave her my best honest answer, that I went because I needed it, not because I had it all together. She told me she sometimes prayed before exams, even though she felt embarrassed about it. She shared that she had started reading some of the Psalms on her own and finding them oddly comforting. The faith we share had always felt like something I was handing down. In the journal, it became something we were discovering side by side.

I am grateful for this shift more than I can express in a single page. There is something profoundly holy about seeing your child begin to own her own faith rather than simply inherit yours. The journal gave her a safe place to ask the questions she would not have asked out loud at the dinner table, and it gave me a chance to answer without lecturing. We both grew because of it.

Why this practice is here to stay

We are nearly a year into our co-journaling now, and the notebook has moved from the kitchen bench to a special shelf in her bedroom, and lately to the bag she takes to school. It has been to the Gold Coast on a family holiday, has survived a coffee spill, and has been the subject of several heartfelt conversations she has initiated herself. I have no intention of stopping. If anything, I want to keep going through the senior years, through the eventual leaving home, through every shift that adolescence brings.

If you are a mum sitting at the kitchen bench right now, missing the chatter you once had, gently consider trying it. You do not need anything fancy, just a cheap notebook from Big W, a pen that writes smoothly, and the willingness to be vulnerable on paper before you can be vulnerable out loud. You do not need to force a response. You do not need to be a good writer. You just need to begin, and then wait with a quiet heart.

You can find more reflections on motherhood, family life and faith over on Motley Mama, where I share the messy, honest parts of this journey alongside a few home decorating adventures and the occasional rant about laundry folding. Thank you for reading, and may your own pages be filled with small, holy things.