In your own words. This goes into the message more or less as you write it.
Not flattery, and not a preamble to a refusal — say it because it is true and because it is frequently the thing being checked for underneath.
The most useful line in the whole message. Most parental resistance is about losing you rather than about the thing itself.
Optional. Asking for something small and specific works better than asking for acceptance.
Why it’s shaped like this
The order is deliberate and it’s close to the reverse of what people instinctively do.
Care first. Most people open with the announcement and add gratitude afterwards, where it reads as an apology. Leading with it changes what follows from a challenge into information.
The thing itself, plainly and once. Not justified, not argued for. Justification invites negotiation, and negotiation concedes that it was theirs to authorise.
What isn’t changing. The most load-bearing line and the one people omit. In a family organised around mutual obligation, almost every difficult disclosure is heard first as a withdrawal from the family. Saying explicitly that it isn’t removes most of the heat.
A small, specific ask. “Hear it without deciding today” is achievable. “Accept this” is not, and it converts a statement into a demand.
What to change before you use it
Put it in your own words. A message that doesn’t sound like you reads as scripted, and in these conversations that’s worse than clumsy.
Consider their language. Considerably more lands if you say it in the language they think in, and the softening that happens in translation is frequently where the meaning goes.
Cut it down. Almost every version of this is too long. The best ones are four or five sentences.
How to deliver it
One parent first, usually — the one more likely to take it, who then becomes the interpreter for the other. Not at a gathering, not with relatives present, not during a conflict.
In a car, on a walk, or while cooking is easier than across a table. Conversations without eye contact are easier for material like this.
And expect the initial reaction not to be the final one. The reliable finding in almost all of this is that first responses are frequently panic, and panic subsides — the position at month six is regularly quite different from the position on the night. More on what actually works.
If the topic is the past
A different approach applies, and the direct question is usually the wrong tool. Ask sideways instead — photographs, food, the ordinary rather than the terrible.