Why Your Teen Hates Talking to You About School
Let me set the scene: you’re in the kitchen, coffee in hand, eager for your teenager to roll out of bed and chat with you about what the day will hold. You’re a little worried about the dip in their recent Spanish test scores, and you’re planning to casually slip into the conversation that you’d be happy to sit with them and study for the next test (since it just so happens that you’ve always wanted to learn Spanish yourself anyway!). Five minutes pass after your first wake-up knocks. Then ten; you yell across the house that they’d better get up. Then fifteen; you knock and threaten to bust down the door. Your teen finally emerges. By the time they are showered and dressed, they have eleven minutes left to eat breakfast and get out the door, and you realize you only have a few minutes to talk before they are gone for yet another day of being too lazy to properly learn Spanish.
“So—how are things going in your classes this week?”
“Fine. Pretty good.”
“Really? That’s…great. Do you have any tests coming up?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You mean you don’t have any tests, or you don’t know if you have any tests?”
“I don’t have any tests—jeez.”
“Um, won’t have another Spanish test next week because it’s the end of the month?”
“Oh my god—are you, like, spying on me? Why don’t you trust me with ANYTHING???”
“I do trust you!”
“Then why are you ATTACKING me while I eat my cereal?!”
“I’m not attacking you. But it is sort of my job to make sure you don’t fail out of school…”
“Oh—so now I’m a failure??? How could you say that about me? I’m doing the best I can! None of my friends’ parents yell at them every single day about how stupid they are. Why do you hate me???”
Tears hit the counter, backpack gets grabbed, conversation ends before it started. But why? How did such a simple talk go off the rails so quickly? Because we are terrible, evil parents who only care about grades? Because our kids are selfish, irrational monsters who can’t handle minor criticism? Of course not! (Well, maybe a little bit of the second one, but they’re not completely terrible…)
It is because, while we are looking at a whole picture of life from our perch in middle age, they are looking at the next 48 hours MAXIMUM. Maybe 72 hours if there is a party or video game release coming up. And the dipping Spanish grades are, to a parent, potentially the tip of an endless iceberg of dysfunction that will plague our kids forever and keep them from getting a high school diploma, holding down a job, or being able to manage a household of their own horrible teenagers one day. But the truth, of course, is that we are looking through a panic lens and they are barely looking through a lens at all yet.
The good news is that, growing up takes care of some of a neurotypical teen’s or tween’s inability to look ahead and plan, though many—especially those with ADHD or other neurodivergences—will need help establishing habits that can override their brain’s natural resistance to consistent time-management and organization practices.
Here, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a look at what we can fairly expect from our 10-20 year-old children as they age:
Rapid Gains (Ages 10-15): Substantial increases in accuracy and speed for inhibition and working memory occur.
Refinement (Ages 15-20): Cognitive flexibility, long-term planning, and adult-level performance in complex decision-making tasks are solidified.
Brain Maturation: Adolescents often have the necessary neural circuitry, but improve in their ability to consistently access these systems under pressure or over multiple trials.
Neurodevelopmental Variability: Teens with ADHD may experience a 3–5 year delay in the maturity of these skills compared to their peers.
With this information in mind, the conversation/argument from earlier comes into sharper focus: a concerned parent is lying in wait to provide guidance to their teen before their grades go down the toilet and they end up living in a van down by the river, and a teen who likely woke up fretting about a “major” social issue at school is suddenly sucked into a talk about some test happening FOREVER from now that they think they will probably do fine on with little-to-no preparation. When you look at all of this through our different developmental stages, it becomes pretty easy to see why we so often find ourselves talking past our kids.
So, first things first, give everyone involved a little grace. You are a good parent who wants the best for your child, and your adolescent is a growing human with immediate concerns that feel much more pressing to them that whatever forward-thinking nonsense you try to throw their way. Neither of you is “wrong” here; your goals just sit across purposes from one another for the moment. Try not to slip in serious talks when they are likely bogged down in something else, and certainly avoid anything rushed—almost no one walks away satisfied from a short conversation about a serious topic. On their end, explain to your teen that all of your talks about school, time-management, planning, etc., are in service of giving them more independence over the long-term. Kids love a tangible result, like freedom from more talks about school with you.
And another great way to stop the cycle of worry/fight/repeat? Reach out to Adolescent Learning Lab to schedule a free intake call so that I’m having the annoying school talks and you can go back to just yelling about the milk they left on the counter.
