I think there are multiple contributors to this 1. post-puberty / hormones 2. lack of life experience in general (not much you can do about those, but then) 3. burdensome expectations from others 4. nobody really teaches them to be precise in their thinking ^ addressable
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I think there are people – parents, teachers, etc – who may even think that it's actually kind of good if kids panic and catastrophize about their grades, their poor attention spans, their failures, etc. "Good! Be scared! Life is scary! Don't get comfortable! Work harder!"
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maybe some kids respond well to this I absolutely fucking didn't and I think I've seen like hundreds of thousands of people retweeting tweets over the years that basically agree that that sort of shit didn't really help them either. it just terrorizes them needlessly
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the real power move with kids IMO is to be as precisely truthful and honest about reality as you can. this means trusting them, which many adults typically hesitate to do IMO because they're fearful themselves, that they will be responsible/blamed if the kid doesn't do well
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I guess I can't speak for all kids, but I can speak for my kid-self, who I swore to represent well into my adulthood. I sincerely believe that I would have worked really hard if I was given proper structure and guidance. I wasn't. I was just terrorized into an unproductive panic
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You can see me working really hard now! 1m+ words written, videos being published every day. nobody is slave-driving or terrorizing me into it. I just had to first unlearn a large amount of the helplessness and guilt and shame that was instilled in me by well-meaning adults
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so anyway when a kid comes to me with something like "how do I fix my horrible attention span", or "how do I stop being so useless", I begin gently with, "I don't even accept that premise. it makes no sense to me. you don't know that about yourself. you're a kid."
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I ask (gently), what is it that you're trying to do? and the vague grandiosities come flying again, "i'm trying to stop fucking up in life" again I don't really buy your assessment of the situation – what do you want to do, exactly? "I want to do well in school" – why?
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here some kids say things like, "oh, aren't all kids supposed to do well in school? if I don't, my parents will be disappointed, my friends will laugh at me, [long paragraph]..." ok pause. that's a lot. what matters the most to you? kids get startled here. nobody asks them that
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"what matters the most... to me?" [does not compute] "everything!!! everything is chaos, life is a nightmare!!" yes ok. sorry to hear that kid. but i'm curious: in this nightmare, which is the biggest monster? conversation can go many directions from here depending on the kid
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This is so painful to read, mainly because this describes my younger self (and probably my present self too) exactly.
to all the kids going through this now
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