Why Every Post Is The Same On Parenting Reddit (What That Tells Us About Tween Behavior)
It’s 10:17 PM, my 12-year-old Mia’s glow-in-the-dark retainer case sits next to a half-eaten bag of Goldfish on the coffee table, and my peppermint tea has gone cold enough to leave condensation rings on my laptop. I can’t sleep because Mia told me this afternoon she refuses to go on the 7th grade end-of-semester field trip to the state park, and I came to the middle school parenting subreddit looking for a new take. What I find instead is three posts in a row that look exactly like the one I wrote three weeks ago: “My 12yo won’t go to school, won’t tell me why,” “13yo quit all their activities, what do I do,” “My tween says everything is stupid and won’t try anything new.” I roll my eyes at first. Why is every post the same here? I came for new solutions, not the same question I’m already asking.
I remember when I posted about Mia quitting art class—she’d done it four years, loved it, then one day just said she wasn’t going back and wouldn’t explain why. I got the same hundred generic comments every one of these posts gets: Take away her phone. You’re enabling her. Just make her go. I tried that. I made her go to one more class, and she had a panic attack in the parking lot, sitting on the curb with her hands over her ears while I tried to talk her down. I took her phone away for a week, and she just sat in her room staring at the wall, no talking, no drawing, nothing. None of the generic advice worked, which is why I keep going back, scrolling, looking for something that fits.
I mentioned the endless same posts to my friend Sarah last week, over lukewarm diner coffee. She’s taught 7th grade for 18 years, and she nodded before I even finished talking. She says half her class has this exact pattern right now. Kids who were sweet, engaged in elementary school, hit 6th or 7th grade and just shut down. Quit every activity. Refuse to participate. Won’t talk about what’s wrong. It’s not that every kid has a unique, rare problem, she said. It’s that this entire cohort went through their most formative early elementary years disrupted. Kindergarten was hybrid, first grade was half in person, half at home. They missed all the small, messy practice of handling public failure: the time you forget your presentation, the teacher teases you gently, you laugh it off and try again. The time you fight with your best friend at recess, you work it out before lunch. When all that’s missing, suddenly you’re thrown into middle school, where work is harder and social stakes are way higher, and the only coping skill you have is to walk away. Avoid anything that might hurt. That’s why all the posts are the same. We’re all dealing with the same shared shift, not our own individual parenting mistakes.
That conversation changed how I look at those same posts, and how I handle Mia. First, I cut out the phrase “why won’t you just” from my vocabulary entirely. It doesn’t matter what comes after it—“why won’t you just try” “why won’t you just talk” “why won’t you just go”—it just puts her on the defensive immediately. Instead, I say, “That sounds really heavy. Do you want to talk about it while we walk the dog, or do you want to just leave it for today?” Giving her an out takes the pressure off, and more often than not, she brings it up an hour later when we’re folding laundry side by side, no eye contact required. That’s how I found out the art teacher called her doodle of a cat “immature” in front of the whole class, something I never would have pried out of her with a million questions.
Second, I gave myself permission to let her take one exit ramp a semester. Before, I thought quitting anything was a bad habit I had to nip in the bud. Now, if she wants to drop art, or skip the field trip, or opt out of the class presentation, we agree she can step back, but we write a reminder on the fridge to check in in three months. I let her skip the field trip, and she agreed to help the librarian in the office that day instead. No two-week fight, no slammed doors, no silent treatment. A week after that, she started leaving her doodle notebook on the coffee table again, something she hadn’t done since she quit art.
I still scroll the sub some nights when I can’t sleep, and I still see the same posts over and over. I don’t roll my eyes anymore. I get it now. We’re all posting the same question because we’re all going through the same thing, and none of the official advice from schools or doctors really answers it. They tell us to “encourage participation” or “rule out anxiety” but they don’t tell you to stop fighting and let them take a break.
Mia still hasn’t asked to go back to art class. Some days I still worry I’m doing the wrong thing. But she’s drawing again, she laughs with her friends over FaceTime, and we haven’t had a big fight about school in a month. That’s enough for right now. I upvoted three same posts last night, and left one short comment: “Letting my kid take a break helped more than forcing them. You’re not alone.” It’s not a fancy solution, but it’s the only one that’s worked for me. And if that means we all keep posting the same question over and over, that’s okay. We’re all just figuring it out together.
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