When Your Child Asks, “Is Life Worth Living?” A Parent’s Honest Take
The dishwasher was humming and Maya was supposed to be doing math. She looked up from her notebook and said, “Do people really find life worth living? Because I don’t see it.”
I wasn’t ready. I had a turkey sandwich in one hand and was digging for mustard in the fridge. My first instinct was to say, “Of course they do!”—the thing you say when your thirteen-year-old drops a huge question and you still have to load the dishwasher and answer emails. But I didn’t. I put the mustard down.
“Where’s this coming from?” I asked.
She shrugged. The school had done a lockdown drill that morning. In science class, they’d watched a film about plastic in the ocean. At lunch, a girl said it didn’t matter anyway because the sun would burn out in five billion years. “So why are we learning slope?” Maya asked. “Why are we learning any of it?”
I didn’t know if she was actually asking about school. Maybe she wasn’t. But something had been sitting on her all day, and it had finally worked its way out.
I tried the explaining thing first. I told her that slope has to do with patterns, and patterns show up everywhere. She rolled her eyes. “I’m not asking about slope, Mom. I’m asking why we’re people.”
That stopped me. I didn’t have an answer, and I said so. “I don’t know. That’s a real question, and I don’t have an answer.”
She looked at me for a long minute. Then she went back to her workbook. I went back to the mustard. It didn’t feel like a win. It felt like a blank space where a parent should have had something better.
That night, I started worrying. I looked online. I read articles about existential depression, teenage hopelessness, meaning crises. None of it helped. So I called her school counselor, not because I thought Maya was in danger, but because I didn’t know what to do.
The counselor asked, “Is she eating? Sleeping? Seeing friends?”
“Yes,” I said. “All of it.”
“Then your job isn’t to solve the question,” she said. “It’s to stay close while she asks it.”
That felt like permission to stop searching for the perfect answer and start being the kind of parent who can sit with imperfect ones.
The next big question came in the car. It was 7:20 in the morning, and Maya was watching the houses go by. “Do you think it’s weird that we keep doing stuff every single day?” she asked. “We wake up, we eat, we go to school, we come home. And then someday we die.”
I hadn’t had coffee. But I remembered what the counselor said. So I said, “I think that’s what life is. The routine. The ordinary stuff. Not a secret reason behind it.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” she said.
“It might not be good,” I said. “But it’s less lonely than thinking there’s a reason we’re missing.”
She didn’t say anything for a block. Then she asked if she could get a strawberry milk at the gas station. I said yes. I don’t know if anything changed. But she didn’t shut down.
That became my main skill: not fixing, but staying. When Maya asks something big, I’ve learned to ask, “What brought that up today?” Sometimes it’s a video, sometimes a crowded hallway at school, sometimes just the fact that she was overtired and hadn’t eaten enough. There is almost always a small trigger. The trigger isn’t the whole story, but it gives us a place to start.
Then I try to keep it small. I don’t ask, “What do you think the meaning of life is?” That’s too much pressure. I ask, “If you could change one thing about today, what would it be?” That gives her a chance to talk about the thing she can actually control—and sometimes, without the big question in the way, she’ll say something like “I wish I hadn’t sat alone at lunch.” That’s the sentence we can work with.
We also started doing a small thing at dinner. Instead of going around and saying what we’re grateful for, we say one “okay thing” from the day. It sounds a little silly, but it’s low pressure. Last week Maya said, “The bus was late and I got to watch a woman yell at a squirrel.” I don’t know if that counts as a reason to live. But it counts as a reason to keep watching.
I’ve also learned to watch the clock. The questions that came at eleven at night were always worse than the ones at six. We made a rule that phones have to be charged in the kitchen after nine. It didn’t fix anything, but it stopped the two-in-the-morning doom scrolling. Sleepy cells don’t do well with the question of whether existence is worth it.
There was one night I failed badly. I gave the whole “life is a precious gift and you are so lucky” speech. Maya stared at me until I ran out of words. Then she said, “You don’t even believe that.” She was right. I said it because I wanted the question to go away. Kids don’t need us to perform confidence. They need us to be honest about what we also don’t know.
So now I say things like, “Some days I think the good parts are enough, and some days I’m not sure.” She can live with that. It’s not a solution. But it’s truthful.
If this happens at school, I think a teacher’s role is similar. When a student says, “What’s the point of learning this?” in the middle of a lesson, they’re not always asking for a curriculum defense. They’re asking, “Do grown-ups actually know where any of this is going?” A teacher can say, “That’s a huge question, and I don’t want to give you a quick answer. Come talk to me after class.” That keeps the door open without pretending to know something you don’t.
I want to add one more thing. If the question sticks, if it wraps around sleep, appetite, friendships, or schoolwork, if your child stops making plans for next month, that’s when you set the honesty aside and go get help. For us, so far, it hasn’t been that. It comes and goes, mostly on tired days after long weeks. I keep an eye on it. I don’t pretend it’s nothing.
Maya still asks. Last night she looked across the table at me, hair wet from swim practice, and said, “What’s the point of all this?”
I said, “The point right now is I’m about to eat this chicken and you’re about to tell me about your swimming thing.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
She ate her rice. We watched a show later. The question didn’t get answered. Maybe it isn’t supposed to get answered. Maybe it’s just supposed to be allowed to sit at the table with us, while the dishwasher hums and the chicken goes cold and one more ordinary evening closes out.
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