Getting Ready for Junior Year: When a Capable Student Starts to Drift

Several summers ago, parents from Old Lyme, Connecticut, came to see me in something of a panic.

Their oldest son—I’ll call him Jason—was about to begin his junior year of high school.

Jason was athletic, bright, social, and generally a good student. But his parents didn’t like the direction he was heading.

He had begun smoking marijuana, something that has become increasingly normalized among teenagers and young adults, much as underage drinking was for earlier generations. But their larger concern wasn’t really marijuana.

It was motivation.

Jason had always been one of those capable students who did exactly as much as necessary to do well—and not much more.

That strategy had worked when school was relatively easy. As his classes became more difficult, it stopped working. Instead of increasing his effort, Jason began falling behind.

His sophomore year ended poorly.

Summer arrived, and he had work he was supposed to complete before junior year. He hadn’t done that either.

His parents could see where this might be heading.

And they were scared.

The Fear Many Parents Have About Their Sons

Parents of teenage boys often come to me with variations of the same concern.

Their son is smart enough. He’s a good kid. He has friends. He may play sports or have other interests. There is nothing dramatically “wrong.”

But he seems to be drifting.

The parents can see a possible future that their son cannot—or doesn’t want to—see.

They have heard stories about young men who coast through high school, arrive at college without sufficient discipline or purpose, struggle academically, and sometimes fail to launch successfully into adulthood.

Jason’s parents had found me through my book, How to Motivate Your Son. By that point, helping unmotivated teenage boys had become something of a cottage industry within my educational consulting practice.

And I’ve learned something important from working with hundreds of young men:

How you communicate the message can matter as much as the message itself.

Conversation Works Better Than Lecture

The actual content of what I told Jason probably wasn’t radically different from what thoughtful parents had already told him.

Junior year matters.

Your grades matter.

Your habits matter.

College is coming.

You have enormous potential, but potential isn’t particularly useful if you don’t do anything with it.

But I had several advantages.

Most importantly, I wasn’t his parent.

That meant I wasn’t the person who had told him to clean his room, get off his phone, finish his homework, stop staying out so late, or make better decisions.

I wasn’t the judge.

I was simply an adult who had worked with hundreds of young people like him and wanted to understand what he thought about his life.

That distinction can be enormously powerful.

Getting Teenagers to Convince Themselves

My approach with teenagers—particularly boys—is rarely to deliver a long motivational speech.

I ask questions.

How did you feel about sophomore year?

What went well?

What didn’t?

Do you think you’re working as hard as you’re capable of working?

What kind of college experience would you like?

What would you like your life to look like two years from now?

What would need to happen this year to make that possible?

A conversation begins.

Then I keep following their answers.

The technique is partly grounded in principles psychologists associate with motivational interviewing: rather than arguing with someone about why he needs to change, you help him articulate his own reasons for changing.

When that works, something important happens.

Instead of an adult saying, “You need to get serious,” the teenager starts thinking, “I actually do want to get serious.”

That’s a very different psychological experience.

Jason Was More Concerned Than His Parents Realized

Jason turned out to be surprisingly receptive.

Despite his recent behavior, he didn’t feel good about how sophomore year had ended.

In fact, he was disappointed in himself.

He was also more stressed about his unfinished summer work than his parents realized.

This is another phenomenon I see frequently.

Parents see apparent indifference and assume their teenager doesn’t care.

Sometimes he cares quite a bit.

But embarrassment, avoidance, anxiety, and adolescent pride can look remarkably similar to laziness from the outside.

Jason knew he hadn’t performed as well as he could have. He just hadn’t figured out how to reverse course.

Junior Year Creates a Natural Inflection Point

We talked about something else that teenagers often know intellectually without fully appreciating emotionally:

High school was going to end soon.

Junior year has a way of making the future real.

College is no longer some distant event adults keep talking about. Within roughly a year, students will be applying. Not long after that, many will be packing their belongings and leaving home.

For Jason, college suddenly became a useful source of motivation.

He was the oldest child in his immediate family, so he hadn’t watched an older sibling go through the transition. But he did have an older cousin who was thriving in college.

Jason admired him.

He saw the friendships his cousin had developed, the independence he enjoyed, and the exciting life he seemed to be creating.

I asked Jason a simple question:

Would you like something like that for yourself?

He did.

Now we had something to work with.

The goal was no longer merely to get Jason to finish his summer assignments or improve his junior-year grades.

Those were important—but they were means to something larger.

Jason wanted the kind of future he saw his cousin beginning to create.

He started to understand that what he did during junior year could help determine his options afterward.

The Summer Before Junior Year Matters

For students in Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, East Lyme, Essex, Waterford, Madison, Guilford, and throughout the Connecticut shoreline, the summer before junior year can be an ideal time for this kind of reset.

There is still time.

A disappointing freshman or sophomore year does not determine a student’s future. A teenager who has developed mediocre habits is not destined to keep them. And a young person who seems unmotivated at 16 may look remarkably different at 17.

But hoping that maturity will simply appear isn’t always the best strategy.

Sometimes a student needs structure.

Sometimes he needs accountability.

Sometimes he needs a plan for academics, standardized testing, activities, and eventually college.

And sometimes he simply needs the right conversation with the right adult at the right moment.

That was what Jason needed.

The most important part wasn’t convincing him to do what his parents wanted.

It was helping Jason figure out that, underneath all the drifting, he wanted more for himself too.