Questions to ask your teenager

16 questions to ask your teenager about their school days

School is the first place a person is seen by strangers. These questions get the teacher who was feared, the one who noticed, the game in the playground, the day they left and whose decision it was. Ask in the car or while doing something else. Eye contact is the enemy of a teenager's honesty.

How to use this list. Ask by voice and record it. One or two questions a visit is plenty; the follow-up ("Who else was there?" "What did she say?" "What happened the day after?") matters more than the next question.

1. What is the funniest thing that ever happened at school?
2. What happens in the first ten minutes of school? Start from the gate.A ten-minute scene told start to finish is how a child learns to tell a story.
3. Who do you sit next to, and what do you talk about when you are supposed to be working?
4. What is the best thing in your lunchbox, and what do you trade away?
5. Which teacher would you want on your team if the school was attacked by dragons?
6. What is the rule at school that makes no sense?A child's case against a rule is the funniest, fairest writing you will get from them.
7. What are you the best in your class at?
8. Tell me about a time you got in trouble at school when it was not your fault.Injustice at seven is told with more detail than anything else in a life.
9. What does the playground sound like at break time?
10. What do you do on the way home from school that takes the longest?
11. If you were in charge of the school for one day, what is the first thing you would change?
12. What did you learn this week that you did not know last week?
13. Who at school would you pick as your partner for anything, and why them?
14. What is the thing at school you are secretly nervous about?
15. Who is the funniest person in your class, and what did they do last time?
16. What music do you hear at school? Where does it come from?

What these questions are for

A good book about a person needs more than facts. It needs the person on the page: how they talked, what they wanted, what they did when it mattered, the story that shows them. These questions cover 8 of the things a writer needs about your teenager: the story that shows them, habits, routines and work, key relationships, loves and tastes, how others saw them, beliefs and values, wants, fears and wounds, objects, places, food, music.

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• Questions to ask your teenager about friendship

Or see questions for everyone else, and how to interview a parent about their life.