Dd is so unhappy. She has no friends, she is at a school which is (mostly) demographically different from us, and she hasn’t made any real friendships.
Her academic performance has really deteriorated to the point where she is below average in every single subject (used to be in top sets in primary and had CATs of 133 just as a reference).
Up until recently she was involved in a sport which took up nearly all her spare time since about seven years, she was successful but we couldn’t really tell if she enjoyed it or if she resented spending so much time on it.
We have had something like 12 discussions with her, trying to understand why she is having these academic/social/motivational struggles, but she can’t really explain. She doesn’t say anything. We offered her to change schools, even home school, to keep her sport, to do more of the sport, or to quit, but she did not express a preference one way or another, so we were at a loss.
Something was clearly making her feel pressured and it was clear that her situation wasn’t working for her. She swears she isn’t being bullied, or harassed online or in person, or anything like that. There is some low level unfriendly behaviour towards her in school such as people not wanting to sit next to her in class and such, but nothing more than that.
We recently made the difficult decision to take her out of her sport. We hope this will give her more time to catch up on her studies without the time pressure, and to hopefully connect more with people at school. We have encouraged her to join a few after school clubs so she has something to do, and we are also hoping she will make friends this way. It’s hard, as this sport was a huge part of her life for so long, but school has to come first, so we didn’t feel we had any other options.
Did we make the right decision? What can we do to make her talk to us?
sorry, this probably doesn’t make much sense, but it just felt good to write it all down.