When a Kid Asks, “Is Life Worth Living?” What I Say as a Teacher and Parent
We were stopped at a red light, my eleven-year-old son crunching an apple in the back seat. The radio was on, some news story about a person who had died by suicide, and I reached to change the station too late. He asked, around a mouthful of fruit, “Do people actually find life worth living?”
I’ll be honest. My first instinct was to say “of course” and change the subject. But the light turned green, and I had a few seconds to decide whether I believed that myself, and whether I wanted to teach him that.
So I said, “Huh. That’s a big one. Where’s that coming from?”
He shrugged. They had watched a video in social studies about a war photographer, and in one part the photographer wrote about seeing too much suffering and how he started thinking existence was just pain. A girl in his class started crying quietly. My son told me he felt “weird,” not sad exactly, but like he was seeing the classroom from very far away.
I knew the feeling. I’ve stood in front of high schoolers and watched them go distant in the same way.
A few years ago, a junior named Hannah turned in a free-writing assignment that was a single sentence: “I know everybody thinks their own life matters, but I have never once felt that way about mine.” She underlined the word “never” twice. She wrote the assignment on a Thursday. I held the paper and felt my chest tighten.
I’m a teacher and a parent. I’ve learned the hard way that kids asking big questions about death, meaning, or whether life is worth the trouble are not usually asking for an answer. They are looking for an adult who can stand in the question without collapsing.
My inclination in both the car and the classroom is to rush to reassurance. “You matter!” “Life is a gift!” I’ve watched other adults do this. The kid smiles and nods and then closes down, because they’ve learned that sharing these thoughts makes adults uncomfortable. Better not to mention it next time.
With Hannah, I did something different. I waited until after class and said, “You wrote something that took a lot of honesty. I’m glad you didn’t fake your way through it.”
She looked suspicious. “So you’re not going to tell me it gets better?”
“I don’t know that yet,” I said. “But I want to hear more about what you meant by ‘never.'”
We sat in the empty classroom for a few minutes. She told me about her grandmother’s death, her parents’ divorce, and the sense that she’d been performing happiness for so long she forgot what it tasted like. She asked me if that was “wrong.” I said it wasn’t wrong. I said it was real, and that real was a place to start.
That conversation gave me a format I now use in my own home and in teaching.
When a kid says something enormous, I ask them to get smaller. Not in terms of feeling, but in terms of detail. “When you say life feels pointless,” I’ll ask, “what are you picturing? Is it everything all at once, or is it like, getting out of bed, or math homework, or everything in between?”
Kids almost always pause. Then they say “getting out of bed” or “coming home to nobody” or “eating alone.” And when they name the concrete thing, it becomes something we can actually approach.
I also try to avoid fighting their logic. You can’t talk a fourteen-year-old out of despair with a TED talk. But you can say things like, “I don’t know if life is worth it in general. I know yesterday evening it was worth it to me because I heard a song I loved in the supermarket and laughed about buying pickles.”
That might sound too simple, but I’ve learned to treat small moments like data points. Meaning doesn’t usually arrive as thunder. It arrives as something you can point to.
In my classroom, near the end of a low stretch in the semester, I started a routine where kids could write on a piece of scrap paper one thing that “didn’t completely suck” and toss it in a jar. No names. It could be “my sandwich was good” or “the guy in third period finally shut up” or “I got four hours of sleep and dreamed about flying.” The jar filled up. We read a few out loud on Fridays. It wasn’t gratitude journaling—that felt too forced—it was just a physical reminder that in the middle of everything, there are points of texture.
One boy wrote, “The radiator in the library makes a thumping sound that feels like a heartbeat.” I still think about that sometimes.
Hannah is twenty now. I don’t know if she still compares her life to others or if the “never” has softened into “sometimes.” We still email occasionally. Last spring she wrote that she had started cooking dinners for her roommates. She described it as “small, but I mean it.” That is the closest thing I’ve witnessed to an answer that seems to hold.
Back in the car, my son was waiting. He had finished his apple and was staring out the window. “I think I understand why people don’t want to live,” he said quietly. “But I also think I understand why they do.”
I didn’t give him a closing point. We pulled into the driveway, and he grabbed his backpack and ran ahead to see if dinner was ready. I sat in the car for a minute, listening to the engine tick. I didn’t feel like I’d solved anything. I felt like he’d seen me not panic, and I’d seen him not fall, and maybe that was the conversation we were supposed to have.
The question will come up again. Probably next month, maybe tomorrow. I don’t have a final answer. I have the jar, and the camera, and the small sound of someone in the kitchen who knows where the lid goes. That’s been enough so far.
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