When Your Child Stops Asking

I’ve become the parent watching a teenager struggling to make friends at his new school, and I started realising this when his old school held a food fair one Saturday morning. He planned to meet up with his old primary school friends at the fair and was really excited and looking forward to seeing them, but it’s not the same anymore. I don’t see that same excitement in him for his new school and new friends.

If you haven’t met him properly yet, I introduced the whole crew a little while back; he’s the one who’s quietly been my pillar.

What I’ve noticed is that when something is happening at his high school, the timing never quite seems to work out for us. And even when it does, even when he mentions it, it doesn’t carry the same weight it used to. He’ll bring it up casually, almost as an afterthought, not really asking, just letting me know. It’s never “I really want to go.” It’s just something that’s happening, and he could take it or leave it.

He’s not a moody child. He has his days, same as I do, same as anyone does, and when he’s having one of those days, I leave him be because I know exactly what it feels like to want to be left alone rather than talked at. So I don’t push. I’ll ask briefly, the way you learn to ask a teenager things, light enough that he doesn’t feel cornered, and then I drop it before he gets annoyed, because he will. That’s just where he’s at right now, a teenager struggling to make friends and real connections at his new school.

What I do watch is him at home. And at home he’s still himself: the smile, the random laughing at nothing, coming in for a hug when he feels like it, and being silly just to make me laugh. He still talks to me about whatever’s on his mind that day, nothing important usually, just whatever. And as long as that’s still there, as long as he’s fully himself around me, I tell myself there would be more to see if something were properly wrong. It’s not proof of anything. It’s just the one thing I’ve got to go on right now, and it’s not telling me to worry more than I already am.

I’m watching all of this from inside an already full day, one I’ve written about before – the version of me at work and the version of me at home and how little space is left between the two. But you know your child. You just do. And what I’ve picked up is that he hasn’t really found his people yet. When I ask about the kids in his year, he’ll say, in his own words, that they don’t really fit his personality. He tolerates them. There’s no one he asks to see on weekends. No one who comes up when we’re catching up in the car. He still asks about his old friends from primary school, and that tells me plenty on its own.

I’ve asked him straight out whether there was any bullying or any of that. There isn’t, and I believe him; his school takes it seriously enough that I’m not worried on that front. This isn’t that kind of story. It’s quieter than that. It’s just a boy who hasn’t clicked with anyone yet and a mother watching that not-clicking happen from just outside of it, unable to do very much about it at all.

I think about myself at his age, mostly because it’s the only reference point I’ve actually got. I remember starting high school with one set of friends and finishing it with a completely different set, people I hadn’t even met yet in those first few months. Who you are at thirteen is not who you’ll be at seventeen. What you find funny, who you find easy to be around, none of it stays fixed. I know that. It doesn’t stop the watching from being hard some days, especially with everything else I’m currently trying to hold steady: the finances, the school runs, and trying to keep his life looking as normal as I can manage while mine is anything but right now.

So for now, I’m doing the only thing I really can. Watching, without hovering. Asking, without pushing. Giving him the space to find his own way into this, in his own time, because I think that’s what he needs from me more than anything else right now, not a solution, just room.

If your child’s going through something similar, I don’t have an answer for you either. Just this: patience and a bit of quiet faith that time does more of the work than we give it credit for.