The Disengaged Teen

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The Power of Engagement

Unlocking Every Kid’s Potential

When Kia was in kindergarten in Hunter, North Dakota, she was the smartest kid in her class. She’d finish her homework during school as soon as it was assigned and never have to take anything home. In her free time, she tore through all the Percy Jackson books. She played the saxophone and piano before taking up guitar. At her dad’s suggestion, she taught herself songs such as Jack Black’s “Tribute.” There were fewer than four hundred people in her rural town, but she was always busy. She’d spend her evenings with her dad, reading, playing, or listening to music.

But in fifth grade, the homework picked up, and Kia, who is white, started to lose interest. The issue wasn’t just that it was harder; the curriculum was often rigid and standardized, failing to capture her imagination or tie into her passions for reading, drawing, singing, and playing music. Kia found it particularly challenging to focus on repetitive tasks that didn’t engage her creative side. The traditional classroom setting, with its emphasis on sitting still, listening quietly, and completing worksheets, felt stifling to her. She saw no reason to put in effort to do something that felt meaningless.

At age twelve, she was diagnosed with ADHD, like her dad, and while it helped her understand her school-related challenges, it didn’t help her get any more motivated. She got a phone at age thirteen and spent far more time obsessively scrolling than doing her homework. She stayed in her room, watching videos and glued to social media. She left the house less and less and stopped talking to people. She gave up reading, walking, and all of her other hobbies. When the pandemic struck and Kia had to learn at home, things didn’t get any better. Even though her school was well set up for online learning, she, like many other teens, did nothing. She nearly failed ninth grade, in 2020–21, and insists that she passed only because everyone passed. “School went from being fun to being a chore—a chore I would never complete, and then I would get stressed because it was never done,” she told us.

The school knew Kia was in trouble. “We’re losing this kid, she doesn’t want to do anything, won’t do homework, won’t engage,” Tom Klapp, one of her teachers at the time, remembers thinking. She was known to staff and educators as a nice kid, “someone you can have a really good conversation with, very articulate,” with a talent for writing and a passion for reading. But it was evident to all involved that school was not working for her. Her teachers would say, “Write this down,” and she would just refuse, Klapp said. “She didn’t find value in any of it.”

Kia didn’t like not trying. When she started giving up, she felt ashamed and guilty. She was angry that getting things done seemed so easy for others, and she started to feel stupid. But it was her dad, Lee, she felt worst about. Lee had dropped out of college and had worked at the local grain factory for twenty years, now as a manager. But he had always pushed Kia to do well in school so that she would have better options than he did. Imparting knowledge to her, he once told her, was how he showed his love. When Kia pulled back from learning, he didn’t stop having conversations with her. He didn’t “poke or prod,” Kia says, but rather encouraged her to keep asking questions. “We talked for hours,” she told us. Her dad was the smartest person she’d ever met, she said many times. When she disengaged from school, she knew she was letting him down, and she hated it.

In tenth grade, a teacher noticed that Kia had some strong opinions about the futility of school and suggested she be part of a learner advisory panel going to Fargo. Would she go and talk to the school board about how legislators and educators could make school more engaging? “It was a moment in which my brain went from ‘This is useless, and I hate everything’ to ‘Hold on, maybe I have a say,’ ” Kia explained. “So I said yes, of course.”

The group went to Fargo and testified. Kia was nervous. She hadn’t had much practice speaking in public, and she had so much she wanted to say. Because she and the other students were there to answer questions, she couldn’t really prepare. At first, she answered the board’s questions—“What are you worried about for the future?” “What changes should be made to make things better?”—by trying to sound as official as possible (“long-winded sentences that don’t actually say anything,” she explains). But then it occurred to her that she should stop trying to sound smart and just focus on communicating her message. She needed to be crystal clear.

Finally, when the board asked whether she had anything else she wanted to say, she saw her chance. She told them that school simply did not feel relevant to kids—sitting at desks, ingesting narrow content rather than doing things related to problems outside their door: climate change, underemployment, rising mental health problems. You can’t force kids to learn, she said. They have to want to do it. But when they do—when they get truly excited about learning—they will be unstoppable.

After speaking up, she felt a wave of relief. She had said what she came to say. They had heard her. She felt powerful.

At that board meeting, Kia was speaking for countless other students. According to a survey conducted by her school, in 2021 just 34 percent of students found school relevant—a figure in line with national averages. “We ask honest questions—‘Who are we?’ ‘What is our purpose?’—and instead of answers, we’re given an equation,” Kia wrote after visiting Fargo in an essay summarizing her testimony. “We want the chances to discover our passion, to find ourselves.”

Learn Well, Be Well

Being a teen has never been easy. But misery levels are out of whack everywhere—in studies, in the news, in our own homes. In the years between 2011 and 2021, rates of depression among high school students jumped to more than 40 percent. A tragically high percentage of high-school-aged kids are also at risk of dying by suicide: In 2021, 22 percent said they’d seriously considered attempting suicide; 18 percent had made a suicide plan; 10 percent had attempted suicide. Among those, LGBTQ+ teens were more than twice as likely to make a suicide plan. This was not just the pandemic: between 2007 and 2017 suicide rates increased by more than 56 percent. The youth mental health problem in the United States is so serious that the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory in December 2021 calling it “the defining public health crisis of our time” and elevating it to the level of a national consciousness. Young people are lonelier than they have ever been and lonelier than any other age group, an anomaly in history. Kids have fewer friendships, are having less sex, and are drinking less—the last two things we could chalk up as a victory if not for the alarming malaise that seems to have replaced it. They are even avoiding the one place they are still meant to gather together: More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more during the 2022–23 school year.

There are many well-documented potential causes: The isolation and anxiety caused by the pandemic. Social media and smartphones. Increasing inequality, with wealthy kids anxious about getting into elite colleges and low-income ones worrying about where their next meal will come from. Climate change, mass shootings, and Americans’ seemingly endless capacity to be divided—all of it weighs heavily on the shoulders of young people.

But too often we overlook another pervasive cause: Students just don’t like what they do in school. In elementary school, three-quarters of kids are enthusiastic about school. By high school, that figure has flipped—more than 65 percent report feeling checked out of school. Worst of all, they feel trapped, like there’s nothing they can do about it. They feel helpless and hopeless. They are hungry for ways to contribute and have an impact on their world—in school, with their friends, in their communities—and they are not able to. Instead, most days, they shuffle between classes where they sit passively at their desks listening to adults. Some are so busy trying to win the race—to be extra-amazing at everything and get to the best college possible—that they fail consider what race they want to be running. Others think the race is dumb and so don’t even lace up. As parents, we shrug, maybe empathize, but assume there’s not much we can do. A high school diploma is non-negotiable today, and high school is, well, high school. Just get through it.

That message is not working anymore.