How To Organize Your Teenage Son

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

My friends with preteen and teenage sons complain more than any other group of parents I know. They complain more than the anxious parents of attractive teenage girls. They complain more than the exhausted parents of willful 2-year-olds. The complaints go something like this:


“He’s so disorganized. He never knows where his homework is. He’s always forgetting something at school or something at home. It’s driving me nuts.”


Of course, not all boys have these problems. Some are as organized as some of their female classmates. But even within the chaotic and tumultuous framework of a teenager’s life, it tends to be the boys who have the most trouble internalizing a little structure.


“I am at my wit’s end,” said a friend who has a 12-year-old son. “He never really knows when anything is due. He never knows where anything is. The teachers are calling, the grades are falling, and frankly, he seems blase about the whole thing – as if it isn’t really a problem.”


And, my friend added, “My son does not have ADD. That’s the first question the teachers ask. But he’s been tested for that. He just doesn’t have organizational skills.”


One mother of a 14-year-old only began to see progress after she insisted her son see a tutor. “This woman stuck a big, square desk calendar in front of my son, and together they mapped out the month. My son would have a paper due in two weeks, so he would think, ‘I don’t need to worry about that for a long time.’ But this woman made him realize that by the time he had soccer practice and that party and that other party, he really only had four nights to work on the paper.”


Several educators and psychologists I spoke to agreed that parental involvement played a large role in helping children who have these issues become more successful at organizing their responsibilities.


“Children do better in school when parents expect success from them and when parents show interest in their homework. Supervising and monitoring, though, are different than doing your children’s homework,” said one Upper West Side psychologist.


What works? Turn off the television. Turn off the telephone ringers. Eat dinner at the same time each night. Designate certain work hours and work places. Set egg timers to mark blocks of time. Help your child fill out calendars or planners in which test dates, quizzes, and papers are highlighted in different colors. Keep the dictionary and pencils and erasers handy. Ask questions about school results and stay informed about what is expected of your child.


Our parents may not have been nearly as involved in our homework, but in most cases, they were much clearer about their expectations – and they were high.


“I think my kids know that as much as I want them to do well in school, I also want them to be happy – whatever that means,” says the mother of the tutored child. “I guess if I had to choose between them doing poorly in school but being happy, and doing well in school but being miserable, I’d take the first choice. But I would describe my childhood as closer to the second option.”


Our parents were also far more likely to be home during dinnertime and homework hours. Fewer and fewer American families eat dinner together each night, and the frequency of family dinners decreases significantly as children enter and go through high school – just when the benefits of family dinners may be needed most.


According to a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Sandra Hofferth, the single strongest predictor of academic achievement and low behavioral problems is the amount of home based family meals. After analyzing a 16-year study, published in 2000, she found that mealtime was a more powerful predictor than time spent in school, studying, or participating in sports or church. This result held even when controlled for race, gender, education, and age of parents, income, and family size.


More recently, a 2003 report from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University determined that how often a family eats dinner together is a powerful indicator of whether a teen is likely to smoke, drink, or use drugs and whether the teen is likely to perform better academically.


“Organization is a learned skill for many children,” said one tutor who works with teenagers to help them develop better academic skills. “But at the same time, you’d be amazed to see the number of children who come home from after-school activities at 6 just as their mothers are getting ready to meet their fathers and go out for the night. I can teach kids how to organize their school work and set up calendars. But nothing can replace parental engagement.”


And of course, there are lots of children whose parents are at home often, who supervise and monitor, who turn off the television and set egg timers – and still have teenagers who can’t remember when the paper is due.


Get out that desk calendar. Even if he might not know when the paper is due, at least you will.


sarasberman@aol.com


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