There is a kind of child nobody worries about.

Polite. Did what I was told. Never argued, never demanded, never made a scene. Every relative said the same sentence about me — so well brought up.

Then somewhere in my thirties I was sitting in my room reading a book I had picked up for no particular reason, and there was a line in it about asking for what you want in life.

I stopped reading, because I could not remember a single time I had done it. Not my subjects. Not my work. Not the largest decision of my life. Every important thing had been handed to me on a plate, and I had eaten what was served and said thank you.

I was not unhappy. That was the part that unsettled me most. My life looked correct from the outside. I had simply never once been asked what I wanted, so I had never learned how to know.

I expected to feel regret. What I felt was closer to relief.

Because if I had never learned to know what I wanted, that was not a flaw in me. It was a missing lesson. Nobody had sat me down at fifteen and asked what do you want, and can you say it out loud. Not one teacher. Not one adult. Not once.

And you cannot be blamed for failing a subject nobody taught you.

Why teenagers

Because that is when it is learned, or not learned. A voice is built in small, low-stakes moments — being asked your opinion and having it taken seriously, choosing something small and living with the result. Built then, or built painfully and late.

I work with teenagers so that fewer of them learn this at thirty-five, alone, with a paperback.

What this is not

I am not a psychologist and I do not treat anything. This is coaching — regulation, responsibility, and forward momentum. When a young person needs clinical support I say so early and help the family find it, rather than holding on to work that is not mine to do.

And I do not report on your child. What a teenager tells me stays with them, with one exception I tell them about at the start: if I think someone is at risk of harm, I act on it and involve the right adult.

— Manu