What you usually don't say to a young teenager

A 13-year-old boy was explaining his sudden transformation from good and engaged sixth grader to seventh grade poor student who couldn’t focus, stay on task, keep up with or care about his subjects. Math was easy in sixth grade, but pre-algebra was not. Essays were required in seventh grade English. Teachers required “a lot of work” from students to prepare them for their “really hard” life in eighth grade.

This was our second session and I explained, to dispatch the common cop-out on children, why I didn’t believe in “laziness.” I also stated that his reasoning was not valid, as he was obviously highly intelligent, partly as his father was a scientist, he was an only child, and the two had been together all of his life.

I explained that he had, as I once had, a “developmental maturity” problem – along with so many other youngsters – where we were just not ready to move up to that next step of maturity, independence and responsibility. That is the step generally from age 12 to 13, from sixth to seventh grade, from elementary to middle- or junior high school, from umbrella childhood to standing alone in the rain young-adulthood.

We were not ready to grow up.

Choices were mentioned. He could feel this structural out-of-sync-ness and still push some of it aside, focus on the schoolwork anyway despite the small child sitting at the desk, despite the depression that had placed a blanket on his growing. He would come to therapy and we would work on the historical depression. But another choice was: Don’t worry about being where you are. You can’t force growth, success. You will need different supports. A therapist who can help you feel OK to be just who you are, who can help you finally express your younger hidden and bypassed self. And a parent who can do the same.

Loss and its failure of expression were the crux of the problem. The boy had never been able to voice his sadness and worries to his father. Feelings kept inside don’t grow, don’t grow up. The child doesn’t grow – despite what you think or want to believe, parent. And now what needed expressing were those old, or rather, young, emotions and truths.

What had he hidden of himself? Loss of a mother, an indifferent mother. The problem of being with an intellectual father who conversed with his intelligent boy, not the needy one. If he could open the door to his real self beneath his repressive and quiet nature, feel before speaking, cry before sculpting his subtle-tinged approach, he’d become someone we could reach, someone who had returned to planet Earth. No longer the “ADHD.” He would sit in his mother’s lap, sometimes for hours, would have no tasks like pre-algebra. He’d be young again, really for the first time, for a long time before he had to be an old seventh grader.