Teenagers Struggle When They Dont Know Thier Interests
When I talk to high school kids, there's a pattern I see constantly: They don't know what they're interested in. Point blank. Maybe they like sports, but not seriously. Beyond that, not much else.
Not every kid. Nothing's absolute. But a lot of high schoolers are stunted this way, and it could be for any number of reasons. Too much time scrolling. Too much time gaming. Or parents working hard just to put food on the table, without the bandwidth to expose their kid to different experiences. Could be anything, really.
Here's why it matters so much: If you don't know what you're interested in, every decision after high school gets harder. I see it all the time with high school athletes. They say they want to major in sports management. Fine. But did you grow up wanting that, or is it just the only thing you know because sports are the only thing you've ever been interested in? Do you actually know anyone who works in that field? When you're a junior or senior checking boxes on an application, are you actually interested in liberal arts, or are you just checking a box? These are rhetorical questions that don’t need to be answered, but the point remains that planning for college gets so much easier once you truly know what you want to do there.
So a parent's top priority should be helping their kid figure out what they're actually interested in. The way you do that is exposure to as many experiences as possible. There's no magic number, there’s no one right way. You just have to follow the trail.
Why does this matter more than almost anything else? Because the old adage is boring but it's true: If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. Would you rather your kid make $100,000 doing something that drains them, that's bad for their mental health? Or make $50,000 doing something that energizes them, pours back into them in a way they actually love?
You already know the answer.
-SL
I Don't Like to Read
Yes, I know how that sounds coming from me. I teach people how to read. I've built curriculums around it. But I think it's an important distinction to make with parents, because a lot of the time, their idea of reading success is skewed toward wanting their kid to enjoy the act itself vs being able to do it.
It would be great if every student loved reading. That's just not the reality for most kids. Or for me. Reading is something I know how to do very well. I view it as a tool I deploy at my leisure. When I need it, I use it. That's when I read. It's not something I do for fun. Ever since I was a kid, I remember opening a book and immediately checking how many pages were left in the chapter. How many more pages until I've read enough of this thing. I never enjoyed it. I just got really good at it. Knowing how to read well and enjoying reading are two different things. Two different acts entirely.
When parents try to shoehorn their kid's interests into loving books, it usually backfires, because reading isn't the medium that kid naturally wants to take information in through. So how do you get a kid who genuinely doesn't want to read, to read? You start comically small. Thirty seconds. Not a chapter, not a page, thirty seconds, and then they're done for the day. Build it around something they actually care about. Kid's obsessed with butterflys? Have them read about butterflys for thirty seconds. Repeat that for two weeks. Then bump it to one minute. Two weeks. Then two minutes. Then three. Small habit, repeated until it's easy, then stretched just slightly. That's it. That's the whole mechanism.
The point of this one is simple. Most parents are trying to get their kid to enjoy reading. What you actually want is for them to be able to do it really well, so they can deploy it whenever they need to.
Enjoyment is a bonus. Competence is the goal.
-SL