It can seem like they’re distant. It can seem like they don’t like what you like. It can even seem like they don’t like you.That’s what children do, after all, they try to discover what they like. They try to separate themselves.

This defined the relationship between the writer Franz Kafka and his stern, successful father. His boy was different. He was sensitive. He seemed aloof. He seemed like he was from another planet sometimes. Yet, as Kafka details in his heartbreaking (and must read for parents) short book ​Letter to The Father​, he really did want to connect with his dad. He was his own person but he wanted to find something, anything he could share with this man whose approval he craved deep down.

But it was not to be because Kafka’s father could not see it. “Kafka’s obsession with the father-son relationship even led him once to give [his father] Hermann a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s ​Autobiography​,” the historian Daniel Boorstin observed. “Kafka hoped Franklin’s description of his pleasant relationship with his own father, in a memoir written for his son, would awaken Hermann to their problem. But Hermann sarcastically dismissed the gift as a feeble defense of Kafka’s vegetarianism.”

Your kids are rarely going to say: Hey, I want your approval. Hey, I want you to show interest in this. Hey, I think this could be something we share. No, it’s going to be more subtle than that. It’s going to come in hints, in text messages, in flickers of curiosity or attempts at conversation. It is your job to hear this. It’s your job to nurture it. It’s your opportunityto build connection.

Dismiss it at your peril.