What are your pain points as a high school kid parent?
Where did you struggle most during all 4 years when your kid was/is in high school?
What information is difficult to research about?
What could have helped your kid during his/her high school to make your life easy?
Wouldn’t a very common pain point mentioned here be figuring out how to pay for college, and that starting the financial planning earlier would have helped?
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My challenge was how much to push my middle kid who hated school and wasn’t performing up to his abilities in general. Also when/if to step in when they had issues come up at school. My two youngers ones were dealing with their older brother’s diagnosis of schizophrenia and the chaos it caused. I’m not sure we made all the right decisions, but we did our best.
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I can feel that, after a certain age of kids, it becomes very difficult to push them .
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Biggest pain point is that my kids don’t have enough time to really socialize during the school year. There seem to be two sets of kids those who party and those who are into sports, and other activities. The kids who do best in school study too much IMO so kids can never get together. They give too much homework and every EC takes up too much time.
That and kids talk about politics too much. I wish that kids were still taught to look at both sides of an argument rather than repeating whatever they heard from their parents or on the internet. It’s sad they won’t be able to have those long discussions without rancor. I’d love to see high school kids thinking more broadly and keeping an open mind on everything especially at that age. We try to talk about every side but it’s hard.
Social media is insane. Have to keep telling your kids about pros and cons of privacy and all the rest. I hate that social media takes up precious socialization time when kids should instead be talking face to face. (FaceTime doesn’t count).
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We abdicated all responsibility and sent ours off to boarding school. 
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This probably more relatable during the pandemic, but both DH and I have always been home, so making sure our kids were functional without our help was always a worry. It’s hard to not get involved when you are in the same room with them. Also, with the way grades and alerts and technology is, you are constantly in the know. I had to turn that stuff off!
I also agree on social media- I got really lucky that both kids are very private and don’t post much. D21 won’t even get TicToc, she says she doesn’t need another time waster. Even with that, I wished on many occasions over the years that I could throw their phones in the trash!!
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Pain? What pain? Only enjoyment! I treated my S as an adult, even before HS. I only get involved when my involvement was welcomed (e.g. when he applied for colleges). I respected his privacy. When I needed things (such as parental access to certain things from the school), I asked for his permissions. It wasn’t that I didn’t get involved, I was perhaps more involved in a way than most parents. I acted as an advisor and I just didn’t get in his way. And he didn’t get in mine, so we both could enjoy. He’s in college now and it feels no different.
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Mean girls. I thought I could do my usual thing of taking care of it for her, but it was she who dealt with it and I learned much from her.
When it came to college application I was naive with the first one that she would automatically be admitted to her top choices because of her high stats. I was much more prepared and savvy with the second one.
College Algebra, Stats, and mean girls/social drama.
Teaching my daughter how to drive. I’m going to hide under the bed now!
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Surprised no one mentioned first love/breakup. D18 had a yearlong dream hs romance, but it was full of drama. She ended up with a downward trending GPA and the boyfriend ended up being sent to one of those fancy NE boarding schools to repeat a year. Things turned out ok for D18 as she still got into an Ivy+, despite the GPA. The ex also did well: one year later, but he was recruited to play his sport at a top tier LAC, after repackaging from said fancy boarding school.
This didn’t happen to me, but a common pain point I see with my mom friends is when their children are cut from varsity teams. Our hs is a powerhouse sports school and so many of the kids in town grow up specializing in certain sports (or dance). And it’s heartbreaking when they fail to make the hs varsity team (or dance company).
I think the greatest pain point for both of my high schoolers was not feeling safe or valued by society at times over the last 4 years because they were young African American kids growing up in this country. Yesterday’s inauguration brought them hope that maybe when they raise kids that could change.
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