Why Your Kid Asking “Is There More to Life Than Studying?” Isn’t a Bad Sign
My daughter pushed the French worksheet to the middle of the kitchen table and said, “Is there seriously more to life than studying?” It was after school, she was thirteen, and the pencil had been moving slowly for about thirty minutes. I tried not to react, because I’m a teacher, and my first instinct was to give her the whole responsible-parent speech about grades, effort, and how this matters. Instead, I picked up a dish towel and said, “I don’t know. I’ve been asking that for years.”
She laughed, then pushed the worksheet again, a little further away. Then she asked the follow-up that actually mattered: “Then why am I doing this all the time?”
I didn’t have a good answer. So I did what we do on slightly clearer evenings. I told her to put the book away and go with me to walk the dog. She groaned, but she came. As we walked, I talked about my own version of that question—how I spent most of my university years convinced that study was the price you paid for a future. I stopped making music, stopped going to see friends, stopped baking bread, all because every hour not spent reading felt like a lost hour. And then I realized later that all the time I spent reading felt lost anyway.
There is a strange message kids catch early, without anyone directly saying it. It goes something like: school is the main event. Everything else is either a reward for it or a distraction from it. And adults, especially parents and teachers, reinforce that with the order of the day: homework first, then dinner, then whatever remains. Which means the other stuff—the hobbies, the aimless walks, the weird projects—frequently gets squeezed out entirely.
That’s easy to do, because the urgency of school is always real. There are tests, deadlines, and percent grade thresholds. There are recommendations and reports. In a world where school can feel like a full-time job with performance reviews every ninety days, it’s not surprising that a child begins to believe the main issue is how to survive it. The question “is there more to life than studying” sounds dramatic, but it’s usually not about doing no work. It’s about being hungry for the version of themselves that exists outside of a classroom.
The dog pulled us down the street that afternoon, and I asked her what she used to do before “studying got so serious.” She said, “I used to draw. And I used to build those maze books for my little sister.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her do those things, or if they’d quietly faded when she got more homework and I got busier. I told her I remembered her sketchbook—the one with the dragons and the impossible buildings. She said she hadn’t touched it in months.
The next day, I left the sketchbook on the living room couch, open to a blank page. I didn’t say anything about using it. For about two days, it sat there. Then I came home from work and my daughter was sitting cross-legged with a pencil, shading in a horrible-looking wolf. It was bad, and I loved it. She told me that her social studies teacher said if she passed the test, she could be “anything she wanted.” And she looked at the wolf and said, “What if I want to be someone who draws wolves?”
I’m not writing this to argue that children shouldn’t study. They should. I’m writing as a teacher and a parent who has finally begun to believe that the lifestyle around school, not the schoolwork itself, is what kills motivation. I see it in my own classroom when students rush through their work so they can get to something else. I see it when they arrive tired because the whole afternoon was consumed by two more hours of work after four hours of lessons. I see it when the ones who are most compliant are also the ones who say they feel empty.
Here’s what I’ve found helps, and it’s not complicated, but it does push back against how most families are structured. First, stop talking about the future. When a child says they don’t care about studying, it’s often because the future feels abstract and far away, and the work feels immediate and heavy. You don’t need to light a fire under them with dreams of university or jobs. You need to light a small candle called “today.” Ask them what they enjoyed when they were bored last summer. Ask what they would do right now if all obligations disappeared. Not to design an elaborate lesson plan around it—just to hear them talk.
Second, try to reorder the day occasionally. I know the school system runs on homework, and I’m not recommending rebellion. But two nights a week, we now do something different. We cook dinner with the radio on. We play a board game. We take a long bike ride. The homework still gets done, usually the following afternoon, and nothing terrible happens. What changed is that the child stops getting the message that she is a problem to be solved, or a machine to be loaded with information.
And here’s the insight that took me the longest to learn: unstructured time is not wasted time. When my daughter is lying on her bedroom floor listening to an old podcast or trying to teach herself origami, she’s not avoiding learning. She’s recovering from the pressure of being assessed all day. And there’s a part of her that’s doing something deeper—she’s learning to find her own reasons for curiosity, without a rubric. For me, that’s worth a few incomplete pages in a workbook.
I’ve also tried to share my own inadequacy. Last week, while helping her with a textbook about geological layers, I told her that I once slept through a whole geology lesson in college, and the only thing I remember now is that the earth has “crust,” which makes it sound like bread. She looked horrified. Then she wanted to explain the whole thing to me just to correct me. Sometimes they need to feel that knowledge is a gift to offer, not just a debt to repay.
I didn’t convince her that studying matters by giving her a speech. I’m not sure that’s possible. But in the last few months, our house has felt less like a quiet where terminals and more like a messy place with half-finished drawings, muddy shoes, and a daughter who occasionally says, “I hate school,” while doing her math homework anyway.
The worksheet gets finished most nights. But the dog gets his walk first. And the sketchbook sits open on the couch, receiving the occasional wolf with the wrong number of toes. That’s not the grand answer to whether there’s more to life than studying. It just feels like the beginning of one.
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