Hodan Ali, 15, had spent three hours braiding a friend's hair in an intricate style she'd practised from a video, and when she brought her mother, Sadia, in to see it, Sadia glanced up from the stove, tilted her head, and said, "The parting is uneven on the left side; you should redo it before her mother sees."
No hello. No wow. Just the flaw, spotted instantly, as if praise were a currency Sadia simply didn't carry in her pocket.
Hodan smiled, said nothing, and quietly decided that showing her mother things wasn't worth the ache that followed.
Sadia genuinely believed she was preparing her daughter for a hard world by pointing out every mistake before anyone else could, as an act of protection disguised as toughness.
Praise is treated as something that spoils a child, while criticism is treated as the responsible, loving thing to offer, a kind of armour handed down generation after generation without anyone questioning whether the armour was actually doing more harm than the world it was meant to guard against.
What actually happens inside a child's mind when everything is met first with what went wrong rather than what went right?
The child begins to internalise a quiet, corrosive belief that they are fundamentally not enough, that their worth is conditional on flawlessness, and that flawlessness is a moving target that keeps shifting no matter how hard they chase it.
Hodan started rehearsing conversations before she had them with her mother, choosing silence over sharing because silence, unlike effort, could not be criticised.
On an ordinary Thursday, Hodan's older brother, Abdiwali, home from university for the weekend, sat at the dinner table and watched his mother tell Hodan that the sambusas she'd made were "too oily; next time drain them properly.”
He said, gently but firmly, "Hooyo, she made these from scratch for the first time and they're actually really good, did you try one before you said that?"
Sadia paused, fork halfway to her mouth, genuinely startled, because in her mind she had simply been teaching, the way she'd always been taught.
She looked at Hodan's face, saw the flinch she hadn't noticed she'd trained into her daughter, crack open with a discomfort that felt uncomfortably close to recognition.
It was a beginning, and beginnings matter.
Sadia started doing something small and deliberate: naming one true, specific good thing before naming anything that needed improvement.
She began asking herself, before speaking, whether the correction needed to happen in that exact moment or whether it could wait for a calmer, softer conversation later, because timing changes how criticism lands almost as much as the words themselves do.
She also started separating identity from behaviour in her language because children absorb the difference between a mistake and a person being labeled far more literally than adults assume.
For any child, here is something worth holding onto: criticism from a parent, even when it stings, is very often love wearing the wrong outfit and understanding that does not excuse the hurt, but it can soften the story you tell yourself about why it's happening.
It helps to speak up honestly, in a calm moment rather than a heated one, because most parents who criticise everything are not trying to break their child down; they simply never learned another language for love.
It helps to find at least one person who can offer the encouragement a child still deserves even while the harder conversations at home are still being worked through.
It helps to separate a parent's words from your own self-worth, reminding yourself that a mother's exhausted, anxious critique of your handwriting is not an accurate verdict on your entire future.
It helps, too, to notice your own effort because a child can learn to be their own first source of encouragement while the people around them are still learning how to offer it.
A mother learning, late but genuinely, that a child can hear the correction so much better once they've first heard that they matter.
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