One Thing I Wish I Knew Before Leaving School: Tips For Preparing Teens For Adulthood
Last month, I was stacking old paperback novels on a cart in my 12th grade classroom, two days after graduation, when Javi leaned into my doorway. He graduated eight years ago, now does framing for a local home builder, and he still had the same faint scar on his left eyebrow from when he crashed his bike into the football field bleachers senior year. He held a gas station iced coffee that had sweated through the paper cup, and said he was in the neighborhood dropping off a job estimate, figured he’d stop in. We chatted for five minutes about the new football coach, his mom’s garden, and then he got quiet, shifted his weight, and asked the question I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. “Ms. Henderson, I still can’t shake this thing. Every time I have a big decision to make, I freeze. I keep waiting for someone to tell me I got the right answer. Why didn’t anyone teach us that that’s not how it works?”
I nodded, because I’d been there. When I left high school at 18, I was a straight-A kid, student body secretary, the one who never turned in a paper late. I’d aced every multiple choice test, written every essay to the exact rubric my teachers gave me, and I assumed that’s how all of life worked. If you studied hard, paid attention, and picked the right option, you got the good grade. If you picked the wrong one, you failed. When I messed up my first quarterly budget report as a 22-year-old admin assistant after college, I cried in the bathroom for 45 minutes, convinced I’d ruined my entire career before it even started. I thought I’d gotten the answer wrong, and that was that. No one had ever told me that the budget being $120 off just meant I’d messed up adding, not that I was a failure, and that we’d fix it by the end of the day, and no one would even remember it a month later.
This past semester, I watched the same thing play out with Lila, one of my top seniors this year. She stayed after class for three weeks straight, stressing about her college decision. She had a full-ride scholarship to the state university’s education program, and a spot at a private art school in New York that would leave her with almost $100,000 in debt by graduation. She kept sliding her notebook across my desk, all the pros and cons listed in neat bullet points, and saying, “Just tell me which one is right. I’ll do whatever you think is right.” I asked her what she wanted, and she just shrugged. She’d never had a big decision that didn’t have a pre-determined right answer. Everything from what time to wake up for school to what answer to circle on the SAT was laid out for her. This was the first big thing where no rubric existed, and she couldn’t wrap her head around it.
The thing I wish someone had told me before I left school, that I try to gently teach my students now, is that most of life doesn’t work on a right-wrong grading scale. You don’t fail forever if you pick an option that doesn’t pan out, and there’s no extra credit for picking the one everyone else says is correct. That’s a big shift from how school is set up, but there are small, daily things parents and teachers can do to help kids get used to that uncertainty before they graduate.
The first small change I made in my classroom two years ago is that I stop mid-discussion or when we’re going over essay prompts to say out loud, “There are three or four different ways to answer this well, and none of them are perfect. All you have to do is back up what you think with what you’ve read.” That sounds small, but I’ve noticed over time that kids stop raising their hands mid-writing to ask “is this right?” and just keep going.
For parents, the most concrete thing you can do is stop jumping in to give kids the “correct” answer to their small decisions when they’re young. If your 14-year-old can’t decide between taking art or computer science as an elective, don’t just tell them computer science looks better for college. Instead, ask them two simple questions: “What’s one good thing that could happen if you pick art?” and “What would you do if you hate it after the first semester?” That gives them practice working through uncertainty on their own, instead of just waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.
Another easy shift is to talk openly about your own small mistakes, without framing them as total disasters. Most of us only talk about our successes around kids, or frame our wrong choices as huge, life-ruining mistakes we barely escaped. Instead, next time your kid asks you about a choice you regret, just tell it like it is. I tell my students I dropped out of my first grad program after a year. I picked it because everyone told me it was the right step for a history major, not because I actually wanted the work it required. I lost a full year of tuition and felt like an idiot for six months. But that mistake is what led me to get a teaching credential, which is the job I’ve loved for 15 years. It wasn’t the end of the world, just a wrong turn that led somewhere better.
Javi left my classroom that day, and a week later texted me that he’d picked an extended payment plan for his truck and decided not to reach out to his ex right now. He said it still feels like he’s guessing, but he’s trying to stop waiting for someone to grade his choice. Lila ended up picking the state school, and she’s enrolled in two intro art classes for her first semester to see how it goes. I still catch myself freezing sometimes when I have a big decision to make — should I list my house for sale? Should I schedule my knee surgery now or wait another year? I still catch myself looking for that hidden rubric, for someone to tell me I got it right. But now I remind myself that it doesn’t work that way. You pick what feels like the best option with what you know right now, you adjust when things change, and that’s enough. Most of the time, that’s all any of us can do.
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