Adjoua Kossou's 13-year-old son, Dossou, had come home from school, dropped his bag by the door without a word, and gone straight to his room. Adjoua was at the kitchen table reviewing invoices for her tailoring business, the warm smell of egusi soup filling the flat, the ceiling fan turning slow lazy circles above her head. She almost didn't notice. Almost.
But she had been paying a different kind of attention to Dossou for weeks by then. Ever since she'd overheard him on the phone with a school friend two months earlier, saying in a voice that had no performance in it at all: "I don't know, man. Nothing I do seems to matter anyway." Seven words. And they had landed in Adjoua's chest like seven stones dropped into still water — quiet, but with ripples that reached every edge.
She knocked on his door that evening and sat beside him on the edge of his bed, in that small room with the football posters peeling at the corners and the school books stacked unevenly on the desk.
"Tell me something," she said. "What do you think would happen if you stopped trying? At school. With your friends. With anything."
Dossou looked at her for a long moment and then said, "I don't think anyone would really notice for long."
And Adjoua, felt the floor shift beneath her because no one had ever explicitly told him, in words he could hold, that his life was not a small thing.
This is the conversation most parents mean to have and keep postponing. This article is about why you cannot postpone it any longer.
What "Trivialising Life" Actually Looks Like In A Child
Consequences doesn't always look like crisis.
Often it looks like a teenager who shrugs at every question about the future. It looks like a child who starts projects and abandons them before anyone can judge the outcome. It looks like a young person who answers "fine" to every question, not because things are fine, but because they no longer believe that the full answer is worth the conversation.
Parents, the child who trivialises their own life did not arrive at that conclusion randomly. They arrived there through an accumulation of small signals: moments when their effort was overlooked, when their pain was minimised, when they were told to stop being so sensitive, when they watched the adults around them treat their own lives casually and without intention.
18 Reasons You Must Have This Conversation, And How To Begin
1. Children interpret silence as confirmation. When parents do not actively and explicitly communicate the weight and worth of a child's life, children do not assume the answer is positive, rather they fill the silence with whatever their environment suggests. Peer groups, social media, comparison with others become the sources by which children define their own significance. You cannot afford to be absent from that defining conversation.
2. Trivialising life begins as a coping mechanism that becomes a worldview. The problem is that the coping mechanism, left unaddressed, gradually expanded to cover everything, including himself. Explain to your child that protecting yourself from disappointment is reasonable, but writing off your own life is a cost too high to pay.
3. A child who doesn't value their life cannot protect it. Children who believe their life has no great significance will not take their physical health, their safety, or their wellbeing seriously. They will not wear the seatbelt of their own life. They will court risk not because they are brave but because they are indifferent. Your child needs to understand that their body, their health, and their safety matter, and that protecting these things is not optional, but an act of deep self-respect.
4. Self-trivialisation is one of the primary roots of academic disengagement. Why study for a future you don't believe you deserve? Help your child link their learning to a life they genuinely believe is worth building, and watch what happens to their engagement.
5. The mental health consequences are long, slow, and cumulative. Children who trivialise their own lives are significantly more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and chronic low self-worth. The child who says "nothing I do matters" today is at risk of the adult who cannot sustain motivation, joy, or healthy relationships tomorrow. The mental health stakes of this conversation are as real as any health conversation you will ever have.
6. Goal-setting becomes impossible without a belief that the goal-setter matters. You cannot meaningfully pursue a goal you don't believe you deserve to reach. When Adjoua eventually started working through this with Dossou, one of the first things she asked him to do was write down three things he wanted his life to look like in ten years. He stared at the page for a long time. Not because he had no imagination, but because he hadn't yet given himself permission to want things seriously. That permission has to be given, clearly and repeatedly, by the adults who love them.
7. Peer pressure finds its easiest targets in children who don't value themselves. The child who believes their life is not particularly significant has little internal resistance when external pressure arrives. Self-worth is the immune system of social life. Build it deliberately, because the world will test it constantly.
8. Children need to hear it said, not just shown. Providing for your child, being present at their events, working hard to give them a good life are expressions of love that children see and feel. But children also need the words. "Your life is not an accident. It has weight. What happens to you matters enormously."
9. Explain the real cost of dismissing their own potential. Not in a pressuring, you-must-be-great way, but in a "do you understand what you would lose if you stopped believing in yourself?" way. Potential is not a performance pressure, it is a birthright. Help your child understand that dismissing their potential is not modesty; it is waste. It is the quiet surrender of something that belongs to them and was never meant to be given back.
10. Teach them the difference between failure and finality. One of the reasons children trivialise their lives is that they have not yet learned to separate a bad outcome from a bad life. A failed test is not a failed person. A rejected friendship is not proof of unworthiness. Stories from the real life of a parent are among the most powerful teaching tools available.
11. Help them understand that their choices ripple outward. A child who believes their life doesn't matter also, almost inevitably, underestimates the impact of their presence on the people around them. Help your child see that the people who love them are genuinely changed by what happens to them.
12. Teach them to take their own opinions seriously. Children who trivialise their lives often trivialise their own voices first because they have concluded, that what they think doesn't add much. Reverse this early. Ask your child's opinion about real things and genuinely engage with what they say. The habit of being taken seriously, practised at home, becomes the courage to take themselves seriously everywhere else.
13. Address the physical health link directly. Children who feel insignificant often neglect their physical health through a general carelessness. Teach your child that caring for their body is not vanity; it is a statement of commitment to the life they have been given. A body well cared for is a belief made physical: I intend to be here. I intend to matter. I am worth tending.
14. Make future-building a regular family conversation. Not pressure. Not performance. Just the normalisation of dreaming seriously. Small things, big things — it doesn't matter. What mattered is the practice of looking forward with expectation rather than indifference. Hope is a habit, and habits are built in kitchens and living rooms, not in inspirational speeches.
15. Teach the language of self-advocacy. A child who believes their life matters will eventually need to say so to a teacher, a friend, a future employer, or a person they love. The ability to say "this is important to me," "I deserve to be treated well," "I am not willing to accept this" should start forming in the conversations you have with them now. Practice the language of self-worth at home so it is available to them everywhere else.
16. Help them understand that comparison is one of the fastest ways to trivialise their own life. This one is specific to the digital generation, and it is significant. When children spend hours seeing curated versions of other people's lives, they inevitably begin measuring their own against a standard that isn't real. Help your child understand that their life is not a draft version of someone else's better life.
17. Model the un-trivialised life yourself. Children watch everything. If they see a parent who speaks dismissively about their own dreams, who laughs off their own pain, who says "it's fine, it doesn't matter" when it clearly does, they will learn that self-dismissal is what adults do. Show your child what it looks like to take your own life seriously: to pursue something you care about, to set a boundary that protects your wellbeing, to say "this matters to me" without apologising for it.
18. Return to this conversation again and again, because it is not a one-time talk. The message "your life matters deeply" is not a speech. It is a sustained, patient, consistent communication that a child gradually internalises until the day it becomes their own voice saying it back to themselves, without needing anyone else to say it first.
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