When a teenager struggles, the whole circle around them struggles too: parents performing normal at work, siblings who shrink their needs, grandparents who worry twice, and managers guessing at a drop in output. Chris Coulter of The MentorWell counts who's affected, what it costs families and employers, and why earlier awareness shrinks the load everyone carries.

The work went out. Deadlines got met. Nobody chased me for anything. It was taking five times as long to get there, and none of that appears in a performance review, a dashboard, or an engagement survey. This is what a year of hidden decline looked like from the inside, what a manager saw instead, and the one signal that showed up before anything else moved.