[_odey]

Your child is burnt out, potentially depressed, from 12 years of continuous, unrelenting school work with unnecessary, overly strict parenting from your side. They don't need an internship, they need a hiatus, and especially the acceptance from your side that doing this is not a failure and that you support them in their recovery.

Luckily for me, I went through my "World of Warcraft (private servers of course)" phase in highschool so by the 2nd year of university I had enough time to get it out of my system and gain back the energy to focus on internships and my career. Other people I know that went through this later in life (World of Tanks, League of Legends) did not have the span of time necessary to recover and they ended up dropping out or needing to repeat a year.

What I needed really, right after highschool was a year off, and I mean really "OFF". No pressure, no expectations, just recovery. Unfortunately, many people don't really grasp the concept of mental health. Neither me nor my parents knew about mental health as a concept at the time, so it was pure luck that I got burnt out early and had time to adjust (4 years) before the last year of university where consequences would have been way bigger.

[RockRobotRock]

Whole lot of judgement and personal anecdotes without good advice.

[Viliam1234]

But a potentially useful perspective on how the situation may look like from the opposing side.

Sometimes the parents are like "how can I increase the pressure on my children to make them better perform according to my standards?" and the children are like "the 24/7 pressure from my parents with no time to relax is driving me so crazy that my choices seem to be either suicide or video games; so far I am choosing the video games".

Now trying to convert this to advice...

Maybe something like: "Hey, I wonder if things are okay; I have this feeling like maybe you have a lot of stress recently. Sometimes when I am stressed, I try to distract myself with the computer, but that's actually not an efficient way to relax, many new inputs. Taking a walk, even a short one, works better for me. And I feel like taking a walk today, would you like to accompany me?" (note: no is a valid answer here)

If the child agrees, during the walk I might start talking (the first 5 minutes) by mentioning some problems that I have (unrelated to the child), not necessarily serious ones, could be something like "I am not sure what to cook for dinner today", but without making it the child's responsibility, so I would also make it clear that I am expecting myself to solve it, e.g. "maybe the same thing I did last week, but I need to check whether we actually have the necessary ingredients at home, after we return". Then silence. There is a chance the child also mentions something. Maybe the important thing will not be mentioned first, but rather something small... to test the waters.

For this to work, there needs to be some general conditions of trust. The child should trust the parent that telling them about their problems will not backfire horribly (e.g. will not result at the parent having yet another thing to nag them or make a huge drama about).

[_odey]

Thank you for understanding. It means alot to me.

[RockRobotRock]

Thank you