When a Child Says, “I Don’t Want to Go”

Few statements create more anxiety in separated families than a child saying:

“I don’t want to go.”

When a child refuses to see a parent, families can quickly find themselves struggling with what should happen next. For the parent the child is resisting, those words can feel devastating. For the parent hearing them, they create an immediate dilemma: Do I make my child go somewhere they say they don’t want to go?

And for the child, the question itself can create a burden they may not be equipped to carry.

In reunification/relationship reconciliation therapy (R/RRT), I make an important distinction:

Children should have a voice, but not the choice of where or with whom they live. That is an adult decision.

When parents agree, they make those decisions. When they cannot agree, a court may ultimately have to decide. The child’s perspective matters, but the child should not have to carry the responsibility for making the decision.

“I Don’t Want to Go” Is Information

When a child says, “I don’t want to go,” I want to understand what is behind it.

The child may be angry, afraid, distrustful, uncomfortable, worried about leaving the other parent, or struggling with something that happened and was never resolved. Sometimes a child feels that reconnecting with one parent means betraying the other.

Those possibilities are very different.

Research on what are often called parent-child contact problems supports this complexity (Singh & Mader, 2025). A child’s resistance may reflect multiple interacting factors involving the child, the parent-child relationship, the parents, the broader family system, and sometimes legitimate concerns about abuse, neglect, or safety.

That is why “I don’t want to go” should be the beginning of an inquiry rather than the end of a decision.

Listen Before Trying to Reconnect

My R/RRT process typically begins before I ever put the child and estranged parent in the same room.

I usually start with a telephone conversation with the parent with whom the child is currently residing. I then meet with that parent and the child or children.

The purpose is not to persuade the child to change their mind. It is to understand their experience.

What happened? What worries the child about seeing the other parent? What would they want that parent to understand? Is there something unresolved? What does the child think might happen if contact resumes?

I then meet separately with the estranged parent.

That provides another perspective and an opportunity to explore what that parent may need to do before reconnection. Can the parent understand the child’s experience even if they remember events differently? Is there something for which they need to accept responsibility? Does the child need an explanation, acknowledgment, apology, or reassurance? Does something need to change?

Only after those conversations do I begin figuring out a path toward bringing the child and estranged parent together.

The sequence matters.

So does safety. A child’s refusal should never simply be presumed to be resistance that needs to be overcome. Safety concerns, abuse or neglect, and other reasons a child’s rejection may be understandable need to be carefully assessed. Singh and Mader (2024) similarly emphasize this assessment when working with parent-child contact problems.

The Goal Is Not to Determine Who Is Right

Estranged parents and children frequently arrive with very different accounts of how their relationship deteriorated.

A child may say, “Dad never cared about me.”

Dad may say, “I called every week, but nobody answered.”

Trying to determine which account is the “correct” one can quickly turn therapy into another courtroom.

The more useful questions are:

What happened to this relationship? What does each person need the other to understand? What needs to happen next for the relationship to become safer and more workable?

Listening to children does not mean handing them responsibility for answering those questions for the family.

Being heard is different from being asked to decide.

Reconnection Begins With Adult Accountability

Once I understand the perspectives involved, the question becomes:

What does the estranged parent need to do to make reconnection possible?

Before the first parent-child session, I typically work closely with the estranged parent to develop an accountability narrative. The goal is for the parent to be prepared to read that narrative, or communicate its essential ideas, when they first meet with the child.

The parent takes the lead—and that is intentional.

If we don’t want to place responsibility for deciding whether reconnection occurs on the child, we shouldn’t place responsibility for initiating the repair on the child either. We are not asking the child to restart the relationship or tell the parent how to fix it. The adult takes responsibility for beginning the repair.

An accountability narrative might acknowledge what happened, recognize the child’s experience of those events, accept responsibility where appropriate, express remorse, and identify what the parent intends to do differently. The parent does not necessarily have to agree with every detail of the child’s account to acknowledge how the child experienced what happened and recognize the effect that experience has had on the relationship.

This approach is consistent with Singh and Mader’s (2025) observation that preparation for reunification may include helping a parent understand the source of a child’s hurt and prepare an effective apology before direct parent-child work begins.

After the parent shares the narrative, the child has an opportunity to respond and ask questions. But the child does not have to carry the conversation. The parent has taken responsibility for opening the door.

The goal isn’t to manufacture affection or require the child to forgive. It is to create a different experience of the parent—one in which the adult can acknowledge the past, tolerate the child’s response, and demonstrate that something may actually be changing.

That first conversation doesn’t repair the relationship. But it can make the next conversation possible.

And then the next.

Trust is rebuilt when accountability is followed by different experiences over time.

What Does the Child’s “No” Tell Us?

When a child says, “I don’t want to go,” adults understandably want an immediate answer:

Should the child go or not?

R/RRT asks a different question:

What is getting in the way of this relationship, and what does this family need next to begin changing it?

The child’s perspective matters. The residential parent’s perspective matters. The estranged parent’s perspective matters. And the history of the relationship matters.

The task is to listen to all of those perspectives without handing the child a decision that belongs to the adults.

Children should have a voice. They should be heard and taken seriously. But they should not have to decide whether they will have a relationship with one of their parents.

The work of R/RRT is to understand what has made that relationship difficult—and find the next workable step toward making a relationship possible again.

“I don’t want to go” is important information. It should be the beginning of our inquiry—not the end of the conversation.

More on R/RRT: If you’re new to this approach, start with Does Reunification Therapy Work? A Guide for Parents.

Next in the series: Accountability Before Reconnection

Reference

Singh, T., & Mader, J. (2025). Reunification, reconsidered: Presenting an integrative, single-therapist framework for resolving parent–child contact problems. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 51, e12745. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.12745