- My daughter told me she was dropping out of high school at 16.
- I didn’t argue and gave her the space to take a courageous leap into early adulthood.
- “My high school’s full of drugs and drinking. I don’t want to get into trouble,” she told me.
A week before the start of her junior year of high school , my 16-year-old daughter walked into the kitchen with a smile of pure delight. “I emailed my principal,” she reported. ”I said it gave me great pleasure to inform her that I’d no longer be attending her school.”
I attempted to maintain a neutral expression like the one I’d affected when — for show-and-tell in a middle-school science class — she’d brought a leech from her tank in the corner of our living room where she kept three of them along with several bullfrog tadpoles and a crayfish.
“So what will you do about high school this year?” I asked. She’d grown more and more miserable in high school , bewildered by constant social drama and classes full of busy work…