What To Do When Your 15-Year-Old Loses A Co-Curricular Leadership Role To A Teacher’s Favorite
The paper grocery bag tore on my way up the porch steps, oranges rolling across the doormat, and when I pushed the unlocked front door open, Rio didn’t look up from their spot on the couch. They’re my 15-year-old, third year, non-binary, and they’d waited three weeks for the debate club captain announcement that went up that afternoon. Their crumpled debate notebook sat on the coffee table, the corner of the application peeking out, ink smudged where they’d chewed the edge.
“Didn’t go your way?” I asked, kneeling to grab the oranges.
“Mia got it,” Rio said, voice flat, still staring at their phone.
I knew Mia. She’d missed half of our driveway car washes for the debate fundraiser back in fall, left Rio to enter all 42 registrations for the district tournament by herself when she bailed to go to a concert, and hadn’t shown up to practice for three straight weeks leading up to the announcement. But Ms. Henderson, the debate advisor, has had Mia in three of her classes, her mom runs the PTA, and Mia stays after class every day to chitchat about college applications. She’s the favorite. It didn’t surprise me, but it gutted Rio. They’d stayed up two nights a week for three months organizing scrimmages, updating the club Instagram, and writing practice prompts. They’d slacked on none of it. It all got given away to someone who couldn’t be bothered to show up.
That night, I went to check on them at 11, after I thought they’d fallen asleep. Their light was still on, and when I pushed the door open a crack, I saw the open notebook on their bed, a line scrawled in the margin: “Why even try if it doesn’t change anything. Might as well not be here at all.” My throat tightened, but I didn’t burst in and panic. I’ve worked as a paraeducator in local schools for 12 years, and I know that when a teen writes something like that, it’s not always a call for emergency intervention – it’s just them putting down how deeply hopeless the whole situation feels right now. I knocked softly, sat down on the edge of the bed, and just said, “That line you wrote. It hurts that bad, huh?”
That’s the first concrete thing I’d tell any parent in this spot: don’t brush it off as “just high school drama” and don’t jump straight to yelling at the school. Both responses erase how big this feels to your kid. For a 15-year-old, that club, that team, that production is their whole world right now. It’s where they’re trying to figure out who they are, what they’re good at, and if their work matters. When the leadership role they worked for goes to a slacker who’s a favorite, it doesn’t just feel like a lost title – it feels like the system is rigged against them, like nothing they do will ever be good enough. That’s the hopelessness that feeds those dark thoughts, so you meet the pain first, before you problem solve.
I just let Rio talk for 45 minutes. I didn’t interrupt, I didn’t offer fixes, I just nodded and said “that’s garbage” when they said it was garbage. When they were done, I asked what they wanted to do about it, not what I thought they should do. Rio said they didn’t want a big fight. They still have Ms. Henderson for AP Lang next semester, and they like debate enough that they don’t want to make it endlessly awkward. So we came up with three small, concrete things that fit what they wanted.
First, we drafted a short, polite email to Ms. Henderson that Rio sent themselves: “I put a lot of work into supporting debate club this semester and was disappointed I didn’t get the captain position. I’d love to know what skills I can work on for future leadership opportunities, if you have a minute to share feedback.” It didn’t demand she reverse the decision, it just put it out there that Rio noticed, and that they cared. Ms. Henderson wrote back a week later saying she’d underestimated how much behind-the-scenes work Rio had put in, which didn’t fix anything, but it made Rio feel a little less invisible.
Second, we looked for a leadership role that wasn’t tied to the school’s favoritism system. Rio loves organizing, so we found a local youth debate coalition run by retired high school coaches, and they applied to be lead organizer for the regional middle school tournament next spring. They got it two weeks later. It’s a volunteer spot, but they make all the calls, plan the schedule, and get to pick the snack menu, which is their favorite part.
Third, we added a 10-minute daily check-in to our after-dinner routine, just to build up Rio’s sense of their own success that doesn’t depend on adults handing out titles. Every night, we each say one tiny thing we did that we were proud of, no matter how small. It could be “I helped my friend fix their laptop” or “I didn’t burn the cookies” or “I got out of bed when I really didn’t want to.” It’s low effort, it doesn’t feel like therapy homework, and it slowly helps Rio separate their worth from the roles school chooses to give them.
Three months later, things aren’t perfectly fixed. Rio still goes to debate practice at school, they still roll their eyes when Mia posts captain updates to the club Instagram. They still have bad days where that old line pops back into their head, but now they say it out loud instead of hiding it, and we go get mint chocolate chip and talk about tournament brackets. We never got the captain role, we never got an official apology, and favoritism still happens in schools all the time, no matter how hard we work to stop it. It’s rarely even malicious: teachers are busy, they gravitate to the kids who talk to them, who share their interests, who have similar connections to the school community. It doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it normal, and that’s a hard thing to accept.
But Rio’s tournament is three weeks away, they spent last night labeling name tags with their friends, and they keep pointing out the little things that are theirs. No one can take this one away, they said last week. That’s enough for right now.
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