She wasn't lying. She just could not see it yet.

A fourteen year old girl came to see me a few weeks ago, brought in by her mum. Her results were not reflecting the intelligence anyone around her could plainly see. Her teachers were concerned. Her parents were concerned.

She was not.

As far as she was concerned, she was doing fine.

Sure, she struggled sometimes, but her friends had her back at school, and between the two of them they made it work.

She had built a system that got her through the day, and in her mind, that was enough. 

I sat with her for the initial consultation and asked her the kind of questions I usually ask.

What is easy for you.
What is difficult.
What happens in your head when you are trying to read something.

Over and over, her answer was the same three phrases: I don't know. Not sure. I'm alright. At first that can look like a wall going up, the classic teenage arms crossed, nothing to see here.

However, I have sat across from enough young people to know that I don't know is rarely nothing.

Often it is the most honest answer in the room, because she genuinely could not see what everyone else could see.

When you have spent years quietly working around a struggle, using friends, memory, guesswork, whatever gets you through, you stop noticing the workaround as a workaround.

It just becomes how you do things. 

That is the part parents find hardest to sit with.

There is no dramatic moment to respond to.

No tears, no outburst, nothing to fix that announces itself.

Just a capable kid getting by, and a parent who knows, somewhere underneath the I'm alright, that getting by is not the same as things being okay.

This is often where the real work begins, not in convincing a teenager something is wrong, but in helping her discover for herself what has been working against her all along, and what could work for her instead.

If this sounds like your teenager, the shrug, the I'm fine, the friends quietly filling in the gaps, there is a way through that does not start with a fight.

It starts with understanding their unique way of learning, so they can see it for themselves too.