What To Do When Your Teen Asks: Do People Really Find Life Worth Living?
I was scraping congealed mac and cheese off a plastic plate last month, the dishwasher humming half-heartedly behind me, when my 16-year-old Javi pushed off the kitchen counter where he’d been leaning and asked, dead quiet, “Do people really find life worth living? Or do they just pretend?”
My hand slipped a little on the plate. My first instinct was to blurt out the answer I’d been taught to give: Of course it is! Just think about your dog, our summer camping trip, Taco Friday, that new video game you’ve been waiting for. But I looked up at him, and his hoodie was still damp from soccer practice, his eyes weren’t red or panicking, just tired and curious. He wasn’t asking for a pep talk. He was asking a real question.
Over the previous month, everything good had felt a little off for him. His best friend since third grade moved to Oregon. He’d just broken up with his first girlfriend, and they’d left it messy. He was cramming for three AP tests and staying up until 1am scrolling through TikTok, where half the videos were teens complaining about being burnt out and the other half were influencers showing off perfect vacations that cost more than our monthly mortgage. He’d started pointing out how tired I am after work, how his teachers complain about grading every day, how his uncle complains about his job every family dinner. He was noticing that the “amazing life” everyone talks about doesn’t feel that amazing most of the time, and he wanted to know if we were all faking it.
Two weeks later, I brought it up to Javi’s guidance counselor at fall conferences, and she nodded like she heard it every day. “Half the juniors I see ask me some version of this,” she said. “It’s not that they’re suicidal, though we always screen for that, don’t get me wrong. It’s that they’ve never been told that most adults have bad days where we wonder the same thing. We all pretend we have it together for the kids, so they think their doubt means something’s wrong with them.”
I went home that night and thought about what I’d been doing wrong. I’d always tried to put a happy spin on everything for Javi, even when I’d had a terrible day at work. If I was grumpy, I’d brush it off and say I was just tired, not that I’d spent the whole afternoon wondering if all the meetings and deadlines were actually worth it. So I decided to try something different.
Next time Javi brought it up, I didn’t give him the happy answer. I said, “Honestly? Some days I don’t. Last week, when I had that big report due and the car broke down and I forgot to buy milk for your cereal, I spent the whole drive home thinking that I was just going through the motions and none of it mattered.” He blinked, like he wasn’t expecting me to say that. Then I said, “But most days, even the bad ones, there’s at least one tiny thing that makes it okay. Last week, after all that bad stuff, I sat on the porch drinking a soda after you went to bed, and the neighbor’s cat came over and sat on my lap for 10 minutes. That was enough for that day.”
It wasn’t a big speech, and it didn’t fix everything. But it opened the door to something better than pretending. We added one tiny, low-effort routine to our Sunday kitchen cleanup: after we put groceries away and wipe down the counters, we each name one tiny, unremarkable thing that didn’t suck that week. It can’t be a big achievement like “I got an A on my test” or “we went to the movies.” It has to be something small. Javi has said “the fries at the soccer snack bar were extra salty and good” and “my dog waited for me by the door when I got home late” and “the rain sounded so good on my window when I skipped my morning run last Saturday.” I’ve said “the barista remembered my order” and “I found an old pack of gum I liked in my winter coat” and “my favorite song came on the radio right when I turned the car on.”
It sounds silly, but it works. It doesn’t make all the hard stuff go away, but it stops us from only looking at the big, bad, overwhelming parts of life. Javi stopped asking the question like it’s a big scary secret he has to figure out alone. He started joking about it, actually. Last week, after he missed the winning goal at his game and failed his driver’s test, we got hot chocolate on the way home, and he said, “Today’s been garbage, but this hot chocolate’s pretty good. So I guess today it’s worth it, barely.”
A lot of popular parenting writing pushes constant positivity, framing it as the way to give kids security. But I’ve learned that when a kid asks this question, faking a perfect sunny outlook just makes them feel like their doubt is abnormal. The small, concrete shifts I’ve made don’t take extra time or money, and they’ve worked better than any pep talk I ever gave. First, I pause before answering now, instead of rushing to fix the question with a pre-planned happy response. Second, I’m honest about my own bad days – I don’t dump all my stress on him, I just admit that I wonder sometimes too. Third, I always ask directly if he’s thinking about hurting himself, just to rule out a crisis, but most of the time, this question isn’t a cry for emergency help. It’s just a kid working out what real adult life actually looks like.
Last night, we were watching a show where the main character quit their job and moved across the country because they thought life wasn’t worth it, and Javi looked over at me and said, “See, even TV people get it.” I said, “Yeah, most of us think about it sometimes. That doesn’t mean we have to have the answer right now.” He nodded, took the last of the popcorn out of the bowl, and went back to his room to call his friend. We still don’t have a definitive answer. Some weeks are still really hard. But at least we’re not pretending the question isn’t there anymore. And that feels like enough, for now.
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