Tonight with your 13 to 17 year old
The prompt
“Has there been a time you had to protect your own time because too many people wanted a piece of it?”
What to listen for
A confident story about saying no or stepping back shows real growth in valuing their own time and energy as something worth protecting, not something owed to everyone who asks.
If they describe feeling guilty about it, that's worth gently affirming, protecting their time doesn't make them selfish, and hearing that from you matters.
If they say this hasn't happened yet, that's fine, it just means this particular kind of boundary-setting is still ahead of them.
What this tells you
How they protect their own time shows how much they're learning that their time and energy are genuinely their own to guard.