What To Do When Your Teen Says They’re Scared Of Life Because Of Past Mistakes
It was 10:17 pm on a Tuesday, I was folding mismatched soccer socks on the kitchen counter when my 16-year-old Lila padded in, grabbed a root beer from the fridge, and leaned her forehead against the cool cabinet door. I asked if she’d finished her college application worksheet, and that’s when she said it: “I’m scared of life. I have so many mistakes already, what if I just keep messing everything up in the future too?”
I almost did the thing I always do. I was halfway through “Honey, those aren’t even real mistakes—you’re such a good kid, you have nothing to worry about” when I caught myself. I’d said that same line to her three months earlier when she’d cried after failing her second driver’s test, and she’d just shut down, walked up to her room, and didn’t talk about it for a week. So this time, I closed my mouth, folded the last sock, and pulled the beat-up folding chair I keep by the counter over to sit next to her. I said, “That sounds really heavy. Which mistake is bugging you most today?”
She took a long sip of root beer and started talking. It was the AP Bio group project from last month. Her teammate Mia, who’s been gunning for pre-med since freshman year, needed a top grade to keep her GPA up. Lila was in charge of building the slides. She got distracted cramming for her driver’s retest, forgot to back up the file to the cloud, and her laptop died the night before the presentation. They turned in half the slides, the whole group got a B minus, and Mia hadn’t texted her back after two quick apology texts. “I messed up her whole college shot over something stupid,” Lila said, picking at a loose thread on her hoodie. “What if I keep doing this? What if I’m just the person who screws up everything for everyone forever?”
I thought about the question for a second, then told her the thing I almost never talk about with my kids. When I was 15, I messed up my first regular babysitting job. I was supposed to put the 7-year-old I was watching to bed at 8, but I got distracted watching a movie I wasn’t allowed to see, fell asleep on the couch, and woke up at 10 to find she’d gotten into her mom’s bathroom closet and dyed the family golden retriever pink with boxed hair dye. The mom fired me, and I didn’t get another babysitting job for six months because word spread around the neighborhood. “I still think about that sometimes,” I told her. “I’m 48, that was 33 years ago, and if I’m being honest, it still stings a little. Doesn’t mean it ruined my life, just means I cared that I let someone down. It’s normal for mistakes to stick with you.”
She looked up, surprised. “You still think about that?” she asked. I nodded. That’s the thing I’ve learned the hard way over the last few years: when kids say they’re scared of life because of past mistakes, we’re so quick to brush the mistakes off to make the fear go away. We think if we tell them it’s no big deal, they’ll stop feeling scared. But that just makes the fear bigger, because the kid thinks their feelings are wrong, that they’re overreacting, so they shut down and don’t talk about it anymore.
Instead of jumping to fix the feeling, you just have to let it be a big deal to them. You don’t have to agree that the mistake will ruin their future, you just have to acknowledge that it hurts right now. Instead of saying “it’s not that bad,” you can say “That mistake weighs on you, doesn’t it?” That’s a small shift, but it makes a huge difference. Sharing one small, relatable regret of your own also takes away the shame. I don’t dump my big, heavy regrets on her—that’s not her job to carry. I just pull out a small, silly old one that makes sense for where she is, so she knows she’s not the only person who walks around with old mistakes in her head.
After we talked for a few more minutes, Lila said she wanted to fix things with Mia, but she’d written and deleted three long apology paragraphs and couldn’t get anything right. I didn’t tell her “just go talk it out” — that’s too big when you’re already overthinking every word. I said, “We have those chocolate chip cookies you baked yesterday. Put one in a ziplock bag, write two sentences on a sticky note: ‘I still feel bad about the slides. I get if you’re still mad, but I miss hanging out.’ Leave it on her porch. That’s it. If she wants to talk, she will. If not, you did what you could.”
She did it the next afternoon. A few hours later, Mia texted her back, said she’d been stressed out of her mind about college apps and took it out on Lila for no reason. They got boba after school on Friday, and everything’s okay between them now. But last week, we were driving home from practice, and Lila said out of the blue, “I still get scared I’m gonna mess up everything.” I didn’t jump in to fix it this time. I just said, “Me too. Most days I’m just faking it enough to get through, right?” She laughed, and we turned up the radio.
I don’t have a trick to make the fear go away forever. I can’t erase Lila’s past mistakes, and I can’t promise she won’t make more big, hurtful ones in the future — she will, we all do. What I can do is stop trying to talk her out of how she feels, help her take one small step if she wants it, and remind her that being scared of messing up doesn’t mean you’re going to fail. Some days that’s enough, some days it’s not. That’s okay.
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