My daughter was seven the night she couldn't sleep. Bad dream, the kind that stays after you open your eyes. She padded into our room and stood at the edge of the bed, not saying anything, just breathing in that shaky way kids do when they're trying to be brave.

I didn't say a word. I just scooted over and pulled back the blanket. She climbed in, pressed her forehead against my arm, and was asleep in three minutes.

She's fifteen now. She still talks about that night. Not because of anything I said — I didn't say anything. She remembers how it felt. The warmth of the blanket. The fact that I didn't ask questions or tell her everything was fine. I just made room.

That's the thing about non-verbal ways to show children you care. The wordless stuff is what sticks. Your kids are not going to quote your lectures back to you. But they will remember exactly how your hand felt on the back of their head when they were crying. They'll remember whether you looked up from your phone when they walked into the room.

The things your body says when your mouth is closed

Kids are reading you all the time. Way before they can understand your words, they understand your face, your posture, the speed at which you move toward them or away.

A two-year-old can't explain what "distracted" means, but she knows when you're doing it. She can feel the difference between a parent who is sitting next to her and a parent who is with her. That difference lives in the body — in whether your shoulders are turned toward her, in whether your eyes track to her face when she makes a sound.

This doesn't stop when kids get older. It just goes underground. Your teenager pretends not to care whether you look up when he walks in after school. He cares. He notices. He is keeping a running mental tally of how often your face says "I'm glad you're here" versus "I'm in the middle of something."

You are always communicating. The only question is what.

Showing up when it would've been easier not to

There's a specific memory I carry from my own childhood. I was eleven, playing in a basketball game on a Wednesday night. My dad worked late on Wednesdays. He told me that morning he probably couldn't make it.

I looked up at the bleachers during warmups and he was there. Still in his work clothes. He'd left early, which he never did. He didn't wave or make a scene. He just sat in the third row and watched.

I played terribly that night. It didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that he rearranged something in his day because I was in it. That's a sentence I felt in my chest before I had the vocabulary to explain it.

Showing up is the most powerful non-verbal message a parent can send. Not just at games and recitals — though those count — but at the small, unglamorous moments. Sitting in the car during the drive to school when you could have just dropped them off. Walking into their room at bedtime instead of calling goodnight from the hallway. Being in the kitchen when they get home, not because you're waiting for them, but because you know that's when they sometimes want to talk.

The power of physical presence is hard to overstate. You don't have to do anything when you show up. You just have to be there, in the flesh, with your attention pointed in their direction.

The forehead touch and other tiny rituals

My wife does this thing where she puts her palm flat on our son's back when he's upset. Doesn't rub. Doesn't pat. Just holds her hand there, warm and still, like an anchor. He'll be mid-tantrum or mid-tears and she'll put her hand on his back and you can watch his breathing change within thirty seconds.

Physical touch is its own language between parents and children, and it doesn't require grand gestures. The families I know that seem the most connected all have their own small physical rituals, things that might look like nothing to an outsider but carry enormous weight inside the relationship.

A specific handshake before bed. A forehead kiss every morning without exception. The way one dad I know always squeezes his daughter's shoulder twice when he walks past her — two squeezes, their private code for "I love you" that nobody else in the room notices.

These rituals work because they are consistent. A hug when your kid leaves for school isn't a random nice thing. Done every single day, it becomes a promise. It says: this is how we are with each other. This is reliable. You can count on this the way you count on gravity.

And here's something worth knowing: these rituals matter more, not less, as kids get older. Teenagers who still receive casual physical affection from their parents — a hand on the back, a real hug, an arm around the shoulder during a movie — tend to feel more secure even when they're acting like they'd rather be anywhere else. Don't stop touching your kids just because they got tall.

Sitting with the hard stuff without fixing it

This one is the hardest for most parents, myself included.

Your kid comes home devastated. Didn't make the team. Lost a friend. Got embarrassed in front of the whole class. Every instinct in your body screams fix it. Say the right thing. Offer a solution. Explain why it'll be okay.

But sometimes the most loving thing you can do is just sit there.

I learned this the painful way. My son, maybe nine at the time, came home after a rough day and I immediately launched into problem-solving mode. "Did you try talking to the teacher?" "Maybe next time you could..." He looked at me with this expression I'll never forget — like I was speaking a language he didn't need right then.

What he needed was for me to be quiet and close. To sit on the floor next to him while he figured out what he was feeling. Not to narrate his experience or rewrite it into something manageable. Just to be a warm body that wasn't going anywhere.

There's a reason the things parents regret most often aren't about what they did wrong. They're about the moments they missed because they were too busy talking. The times they should have closed their mouth and opened their arms instead.

Silence, when it's accompanied by presence, is one of the loudest things a parent can offer. Your child doesn't need you to make it better. They need to know that whatever they're feeling, you can handle being in the room with it.

Your face when they walk in

I want you to try something. The next time your child walks into the room, notice what your face does.

Does it light up? Do your eyes move toward them? Does your mouth soften? Or do you keep looking at your laptop and say "hey" without turning around?

Kids form their self-image partly from the faces of the people who love them. When your child walks into a room and sees your face brighten, it tells them something words can't: the room is better because you're in it.

This sounds like a small thing. It's not small. It's one of the biggest non-verbal messages you will ever send your child, and you send it (or don't) dozens of times a week.

Think about how you feel when you walk into a room and someone's face lights up at the sight of you. Now think about how you feel when you walk in and nobody looks up. You are an adult with decades of emotional resilience, and it still stings. Imagine being eight.

You don't need to perform excitement every time your kid enters the kitchen. Just look up. Make eye contact. Let your face do the thing it naturally does when you see someone you love — if you give it the chance.

What they'll carry

Here's what I've come to believe about parenting and communication. The words we say to our children matter. Of course they do. But the bond between parent and child is built more from what's felt than what's said.

Your kids are going to forget 95% of your advice. They will not forget how it felt to be in a room with you. They will not forget whether you were the kind of parent who put down the phone, who showed up in the bleachers, who sat with them during the hard moments without needing to fill the silence.

The non-verbal language of love is older than words. Babies understand it before they understand anything else. And adults, even grown adults with children of their own, still crave it from their parents. The touch. The presence. The face that says you matter to me.

You don't need to be a perfect parent to get this right. You don't need a strategy or a system. You just need to pay attention to the thousand small moments where your body, your face, and your presence are doing the talking.

Because your children are listening. Even when — especially when — nobody is saying a word.

If you've been thinking about what you want your kids to carry with them long after you're gone, When I Die Files gives you a quiet place to capture those things — the words, the memories, the messages that matter most — so nothing important gets left unsaid.