I get young people in my DMs all the time.
A common thing I notice about their despair is that they do a lot of generalizing (“I can’t seem to study for this test” → “I can’t do anything”). Lots of catastrophic thinking, things get very grandiose.
I remember this feeling too.
I think there are multiple contributors to this.
- post-puberty / hormones
- lack of life experience in general
(not much you can do about those, but then)
- burdensome expectations from others
- nobody really teaches them to be precise in their thinking
these are addressable!
I think there are people – parents, teachers, etc – who may even think that it’s actually kind of good if kids panic and catastrophize about their grades, their poor attention spans, their failures, etc. “Good! Be scared! Life is scary! Don’t get comfortable! Work harder!”
Maybe some kids respond well to this. I absolutely fucking didn’t. And I think I’ve seen like hundreds of thousands of people retweeting tweets over the years that basically agree that that sort of shit didn’t really help them either. It just terrorizes them needlessly.
I think the real power move with kids is to be as precisely truthful and honest about reality as you can.
This means trusting them, which I think many adults typically hesitate to do because they’re fearful themselves, that they will be blamed if the kid doesn’t do well.
I guess I can’t speak for all kids, but I can speak for my kid-self, who I swore to represent well into my adulthood. I sincerely believe that I would have worked really hard if I was given proper structure and guidance. I wasn’t. I was just terrorized into an unproductive panic.
You can see me working really hard now! I’ve written over a million words, and I’ve been publishing videos almost every day. Nobody is slave-driving or terrorizing me into it. I just had to first unlearn a large amount of the helplessness and guilt and shame that was instilled in me by well-meaning adults.
So anyway when a kid comes to me with something like “how do I fix my horrible attention span”, or “how do I stop being so useless”, I begin gently with, “I don’t even accept that premise. It makes no sense to me. You don’t know that about yourself. You’re a kid.”
I ask (gently), what is it that you’re trying to do?
and the vague grandiosities come flying again, “I’m trying to stop fucking up in life!”
Again I don’t really buy your assessment of the situation – what do you want to do, exactly?
“I want to do well in school!” –Wwhy?
Here some kids say things like, “Oh, aren’t all kids supposed to do well in school? if I don’t, my parents will be disappointed, my friends will laugh at me, [long paragraph]… I will be a failure, my life will be ruined, I will die sad and alone…”
Okay, pause. that’s a lot. What matters the most to you?
Kids get startled here. Nobody asks them that.
“What matters the most… to me?” (does not compute) “Everything!!! Everything is chaos, life is a nightmare!!”
Yes, okay. I’m sorry to hear that kid. but I’m still curious: In this nightmare, which is the biggest monster?
The conversation can go many directions from here, depending on the kid.
Latest breakthrough with latest kid: he wasn’t being entirely honest with himself about his own goals and interests. I’m guessing he didn’t even have the headspace to do that, or feel like he had permission to ask that. so he was thrashing about wildly and struggling to breathe.
I actually do honestly believe that kids who have a moderately clear (as clear as a kid can reasonably get, at least) sense of what they’re into, what they’re about, what they like, what their options are, etc will on average do better in school than a kid who’s living in terror.
Sometimes you do get a terrified kid who somehow manages to walk the tightrope between terror & despair, get all their homework done, and do well. Have you seen these kids though? Sometimes they literally seem like soldiers with PTSD. There is no light in their eyes. only KPIs.
Anyway. another week, another kid who’s so desperate that they turn to an internet stranger. Why? For what? Ithink it’s for the hope of being seen, being listened to. sometimes they get someone like me. But sometimes they get abusive, manipulative assholes. And that’s really dangerous.