15 y.o son--smart kid; hates school

[Anonymous]

There is a big difference between disliking school and having anxiety/depression. If you think he is anxious or depressed, I would suggest finding a therapist who can more deeply evaluate this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We're seeing some deep unhappiness with our son, who is a freshman, with school and "the point of it all." He's at a good private school with a good faculty, but he hasn't seemed to really connect to his teachers and his classes. He feels, despite the school's insistence on learning being the most important thing, pressure on grades being the most important thing there. (This is not one of the typical DMV pressure cooker schools, and he says he doesn't think it's different at other places. He HATES homework.g) He's got a strong friend group and is social, if also an introvert (and so can get tapped out after too much people time, but he has a good sense of calibrating that for himself).

I know this is impossible to judge from outside, but I'm trying to gauge how much of this is high school transition, how much is the current climate (lots of recent research on how disengaged students are with school, especially at the high school and college level) and, well, everything in these strange times. I think there's some anxiety and depression going on beyond garden-variety teen apathy and grumpiness that reaches into sadness that he's shared with me.

If you saw this with your son around this age, what were your next steps? Upping physical activity? (He's not a sporty kid.) Therapy? Medication? I'm not sure how to help him fully. And while I think the school counselors both at his previous and current school are well trained to talk to kids this age and give them tools for managing stress, he's mostly scoffed at their guidance to the whole class group, and so talking to a therapist is going to be a hard sell (but maybe a necessary one).

Open to perspective from folks who've been there, done that. TIA.

I'm sorry - medication, because he has an opinion you don't like? You're not going to drug him into liking school, OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We're seeing some deep unhappiness with our son, who is a freshman, with school and "the point of it all." He's at a good private school with a good faculty, but he hasn't seemed to really connect to his teachers and his classes. He feels, despite the school's insistence on learning being the most important thing, pressure on grades being the most important thing there. (This is not one of the typical DMV pressure cooker schools, and he says he doesn't think it's different at other places. He HATES homework.g) He's got a strong friend group and is social, if also an introvert (and so can get tapped out after too much people time, but he has a good sense of calibrating that for himself).

I know this is impossible to judge from outside, but I'm trying to gauge how much of this is high school transition, how much is the current climate (lots of recent research on how disengaged students are with school, especially at the high school and college level) and, well, everything in these strange times. I think there's some anxiety and depression going on beyond garden-variety teen apathy and grumpiness that reaches into sadness that he's shared with me.

If you saw this with your son around this age, what were your next steps? Upping physical activity? (He's not a sporty kid.) Therapy? Medication? I'm not sure how to help him fully. And while I think the school counselors both at his previous and current school are well trained to talk to kids this age and give them tools for managing stress, he's mostly scoffed at their guidance to the whole class group, and so talking to a therapist is going to be a hard sell (but maybe a necessary one).

Open to perspective from folks who've been there, done that. TIA.

This pretty much describes my three boys their freshman year.

This attitude turns around the end of sophomore year or beginning of junior year.


My two oldest are both thriving in college and my youngest is a junior in hs.

[Anonymous]

School mostly sucks. He’s facing down 3 1/2 more years of it. Have some empathy.

[Anonymous]

Therapy? Medication? Are you serious? You are part of the pressure cooker.

You say he hates homework. Does he test well?
He is smart and not engaged by his classes.

I agree that if he found topics or interests that engage him, he would be more interested in learning that helped him pursue them in more depth. Learning, nit schoolwork.

The pressure cooker culture says he MUST work long hours on schoolwork to get good grades and have a top college worthy resume. Maybe he won't go to a top college. Maybe he'll pick Eckerd, major in marine science and be a marine biologist. A failure in your eyes but not in marine biologists' eyes. On to Woods Hole or Scripps. Sorry about your brag rights nearvterm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’d transfer him. Why is he a 15 year old freshman?

His birthday is probably after the cut off! I turned 15 during my freshman year and so did most of my classmates.

[Anonymous]

Being 15 and a freshman is totally normal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’d transfer him. Why is he a 15 year old freshman?

His birthday is probably after the cut off! I turned 15 during my freshman year and so did most of my classmates.

My child was 15 Sophmore year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’d transfer him. Why is he a 15 year old freshman?

His birthday is probably after the cut off! I turned 15 during my freshman year and so did most of my classmates.

Most freshman start at age 14 and then turn 15 sometime within the year. Unless they are young and have a summer birthday (in which case they will turn 15 in the summer before sophomore year) or were redshirted (they will start freshman year at 15 then).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’d transfer him. Why is he a 15 year old freshman?

You’re an idiot.

[Anonymous]

OP here. Thanks for the helpful posts, including book recs and ideas about exploring what crossovers there are between individual and shared activities. The point about my needing to be more thoughtful about arranging what were once playdates but are now "hangouts" is important for me to remember, because we don't have the benefit of the unplanned neighborhood drop in.

As for having gone private, we live in DC and have cycled through blocks of time at public and then private. Public elementary was a good fit, private middle was a good fit, and I think, overall, it will be true for high school too.
And yes--as someone mentions, we noticed a growing difference between when his older sister was at the middle school he attended and how the hard-driving (and richer) parents started to change the atmosphere. The problem has always been in DC that there's not much in between the private schools and the over-enrolled and under-staffed publics. Our friends with kids at Walls and Duke and Banneker have kids who are pretty down on school, too. The public high school we're zoned for is way too big and overwhelming for a kid like him who'd get lost in the noise, and while, yes, it would be much easier and with much less homework, that's would cause different kinds of stress in that chaotic an environment and will catch him up with increased stress in postsecondary ed. (College prof here, seeing more of this in the era of the turn-in-nothing, still get a 50% environment that affects the whole class' approach to learning. But I also see the flip side of the students who crack after so many years of academic pressure, once they're somewhat on their own, and so we've tried to be smart about the high school situation and make sure it was his choice. And the young men in college, in particular? So many of them are struggling emotionally.) It's all tough.

And no, I don't want to "drug him up" or "fix" him. To be frank, there's a long line of depression and anxiety from both sides of the family (also, migraines! Great genetics, mom and dad!), and my GP actually told me to talk frankly to both of my kids about it and be open with how and when they're feeling more down than usual. It's part of why I posed the question here, to get some outside perspective. It's a good sign to me that he and I have been talking about this together and trying to think through what might help.

I don't need him to love school or get high marks or be anyone he's not. I absolutely do not care if he gets into a "top" college or even decides not to go immediately (or never, if he finds something he loves instead). (With the way things are going in higher ed, who even knows if colleges will still exist or matter in the same way we think it does now, in three years...). I'd like for him to feel good enough about things that he could try new things and be open to learning, and maybe find his way to something that's intrinsically meaningful to him, and so I'm just trying to find ways to support him in that journey at what I know isn't the easiest developmental time of life.

Thanks again for the support here.

[Anonymous]

Is he used to homework? Mine had none in public MS and then hours in private HS. He said he hated school too.

[Anonymous]

Take him out of Private school.

Why in the world are you paying for that?

[Anonymous]

You should remind him that school is his 40-hour-per-week job. Yeah, it is a pain, but we all have to do it. So he should stop complaining and concentrate on choosing rewarding hobbies to do in his spare time... Cooking? Hiking? Woodworking? Tennis? Photography? Gym? Guitar? Rock climbing? Fishing?

[Anonymous]

I think most kids hate school. Who doesn't with endless deadlines and lots of work? In the end, they should find something that they enjoy. Sometimes there's a cool teacher who makes a class interesting, but it's more likely to be an extra-curricular activity (clubs, sports, drama, choir etc.) that makes kids feel that they fit in, that they "represent" the school, that they're part of it. At the end of the day, kids like HS experience when they feel that they belong.