What I Loved Most About High School (And What It Teaches Parents About Teen Downtime)
The AC in my minivan blew warm air last week as I drove my 15-year-old to her first high school cross country practice. She picked at the peeling unicorn sticker on the armrest between us, and halfway there she asked, out of nowhere, “What was your favorite part of high school?”
I thought for a minute, cycling through the expected answers: prom, winning the district science fair, graduation day. None of it felt right. So I told her the truth. “My 10-minute walk between second and third period, every day, with my best friend Lila.”
Second period was AP Bio in the moldy basement of the old building, third was art in a creaky portable at the far end of campus. The walk took you past the football field and through a grove of old oak trees that dropped sticky acorns all over the sidewalk. We never hurried. We complained about the cafeteria’s pepperoni pizza that was always burnt around the edges, made fun of the vice principal’s obviously fake toupee, guessed which teachers were secretly dating, and rehashed the drama from the night before on AOL Instant Messenger. Some days we didn’t talk at all. We just kicked acorns across the concrete and breathed. None of it counted for anything. It wasn’t graded, it didn’t help with college apps, it didn’t check a box for any requirement. It was just ours.
She stared at me like I’d told her I walked uphill both ways in the snow to school. “Ten whole minutes between classes? We get four. If you stop to tie your shoe you get a tardy.” That hit me. I’d forgotten how packed my daughter’s schedule already is. When I toured her high school last spring, the principal bragged that they’d cut passing periods from six minutes to four a few years back, and cut two free periods from the weekly schedule to add mandatory academic intervention. “We don’t waste any learning time,” he said. That’s the line everyone uses now, right? Every minute has to count for something.
Later that night I texted Lila, and she remembered those walks too. She reminded me that when the admin tried to cut our passing period to five minutes back when we were juniors, the whole student body skipped lunch for a day to protest. The admin reversed it a week later, because half of us were already skipping mandatory study hall just to hang out anyway. We would have found that time no matter what, because we needed it.
That got me thinking about how obsessed we are with productivity for teens these days. I’m guilty of it too. When my daughter started high school last year, I signed her up for a monthly college prep workshop, an art class on Wednesdays, and volunteer work at the local animal shelter on Saturdays, so her whole week was packed from wake up to bedtime. I thought I was giving her opportunities. But what I was really doing was taking away all the unplanned space she needed to breathe.
It’s not just schools that do this. A lot of us parents think any time a teen isn’t studying or working toward a goal is wasted time. But that unstructured, low-stakes, nothing time is actually where teens do the most important developmental work. That’s where they practice figuring out what they like, how to talk to people without adult direction, how to process all the stress of grades and college apps and growing up. It doesn’t look like anything productive from the outside, but it’s the stuff that sticks with you.
I started making small changes a month ago, after that conversation in the car. I canceled the monthly college prep workshop, which she’d complained about for weeks anyway. Now she has every Friday evening completely free, no plans, no commitments, no one asking her to get anything done. That’s one concrete change any parent can make: cut one scheduled activity a semester, just to leave a block of empty time. You don’t have to throw out all their extracurriculars, just carve out one chunk of nothing.
Another thing I do now: I don’t bug her to start homework the second she walks in the door. She used to have to drop her bag and get straight to work, but now I tell her she can do whatever she wants for 15 minutes after school. Most days she sits on the front porch with her best friend who lives two houses down, and they eat popsicles and scroll TikTok. I don’t hover, I don’t ask about homework, I just leave them alone. That’s another small thing that doesn’t take any extra work, just a little willingness to let time go unused.
When she talks about spending time with her friends “doing nothing,” I don’t say it’s a waste anymore. I just ask, “What’s the dumbest thing you did today?” That’s a small shift from asking what they learned or what they accomplished, and it opens up way more conversation than any lecture about productivity.
Last week, she got a B- on her chemistry midterm. She’d spent her free Friday the week before making a silly TikTok with her friend instead of cramming for the test. I almost opened my mouth to say she should have studied more. But then I thought about my 10-minute walks with Lila. I can’t tell you what I got on my AP Bio final senior year, but I can still describe the way the oak leaves smelled in the fall, and how we laughed until our sides hurt when the vice principal caught us skipping a pep rally and gave us a warning we didn’t care about. Twenty years later, Lila and I still text every week, and we still joke about that burnt pizza.
I still get anxious sometimes. I still catch myself trying to fill an empty Saturday with something “useful.” I don’t know if my approach is perfect, and there are still days I worry I’m not preparing her enough for what comes next. But I know that the stuff that matters isn’t always the stuff that checks a box. Right now, leaving space for the nothing seems to be working.
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