Ouch sounds like that your oldest son is having a tough time of it. Maybe he might be better off deferring a year so he can look for work. He might be able to help out your twins and your youngest son with their homework.
Defer a year to work? That doesn't make sense. My husband learned zero study skills in high school and had a VERY rough time making the transition to college. He struggled and struggled and struggled despite being incredibly smart, simply because he didn't have the study skills. He's now 29 and about to graduate from college. (He's been working full-time for most of the degree and supporting our family, doing classes in the evenings/weekends/however possible.) He did have a small break when the classes got frustrating, but it sure didn't help him actually get the degree finished sooner and he regrets that now. When he started back, he took some classes that were enjoyable to him, where he wanted to succeed for personal (not academic) reasons. 6 year plan, eh? Feel better, knowing my husband took 11 years between high school and college graduations! (Granted, my husband has a successful career already and is supporting a wife and three kids very well, but still... 11 years is a long time!)
OK kids, please refrain from personal attacks. If this happens again, I'm going to make you hug and tell each other how much you love them. Sachin
I find this an interesting comment. When I was in highschool, my mom -- effectively a single parent, since my dad was hospitalized -- would not allow me to listen to "rock and roll" music at all during the week. I was allowed to watch TV if my homework had been completed. I don't think my mom was inordinately strict; I think she was trying to prepare me for life after highschool, and she knew that certain habits I would have adopted were going to create obstacles for me, if I indulged myself. As a substitute teacher, I don't assign homework. I collect homework that other teachers assign, and my observation is that the better students -- in terms of grades -- do homework and the other kids don't, or at least they rarely turn it in. I also have seen a correspondence between writing ability and doing homework. The kids that do homework are better able to put together a lucid sentence. Much of what happens in this area is a function of what kind of culture exists in the home, whether the parents are up to the task of setting standards for their children that are not driven by the demands of the children to be "connected".
Let me start with the good stuff first. Both our sons are great kids, with good hearts and reasonably good heads on their shoulders. They have, moreover, for the most part chosen good friends. Just this year one son turned 15 the day after the last day of school and had 20 friends spontaneously show up in front of the house to sing him Happy Birthday. The same group, upset by the highly sexualized atmosphere of Homecoming Dance at the local HS, planned and executed their own alternative homecoming dance, complete with dinner out and a small dance in a rented building at a local park. Despite the fact that there were couples in the group, the girls all traveled in one set of cars and the boys in another, and slow dances were disallowed. Now to address your point more directly: In fact, my wife and I are among the strictest parents we know. While we don't prevent him from listening to music during the week, our HS age son is expected to complete his homework before he plays and he's supposed to present his planner to us on a regular basis. We also expect him to do chores around the house. Having said that, I should point out that we live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the qualifying standard for strict parenting is (to me anyway) astonishing low. We are apparently in a small minority of parents who expect our children to eat dinner at home as a matter of course; who treat sleeping over at somebody else's house something that ought to planned for earlier than, say, 10 pm on the night of; and think 10 o'clock on a weeknight is plenty late for a 15 year old's bed time. One upshot of this is that there is a constant tension between our expectations and the behavior of our kids' friends--we are always having either to say no to activities and prevent him from participating in one way or another. It's exhausting and frequently genuinely painful for all of us. The best long term strategy is to teach him to plan ahead to maximize his flexibility and to internalize some of the values so that he says no for us. Fortunately teenagers are blessed with an abundance of foresight and self-restraint, so this strategy is working out just great. What does this have to do with homework? Well mainly it creates an environment wherein those intrusions that your mother found rather easy to exclude as extra are now considered normal. Music and TV are still pretty simple, but because they're part of a primary homework doing mechanism (the computer) they're a much more accessible temptation. Video games are the worst, because they are so seductive--they provide instant, brainless and totally worthless gratification and playing them manufactures a weird anxiety along with a short attention span. I'd eliminate them from my kids' life completely if doing so was not tantamount to social isolation. Instant messaging is the most complicated. With respect to homework, it's a distraction and he's not supposed to be doing it. On the other hand, at any given time between 4 and 11 pm, there's a subset of his friends online and preventing him from interacting with them genuinely takes him out of the loop. Right now, the only networked computer he's got access to is one that puts him in parental view.
my remarks were not meant as an indictment of you and your wife: i have been around here long enough to be able to intuit/induce/reckon from what you have said elsewhere that you and the missus will be "on your jobs" as far as your kids are concerned. my interest was more generic: i'm sure that there is some level of direct proportionality between parental oversight and adolescent value sets, and my guess is that letting a HS kid plug into anything, whether it be an iPod, the Net, or a peer group whose activities and whereabouts are yet a mystery is a formula for inappropriately expressed sexual experimentation, drug usage, and even -- horrors -- body piercing
Understood, absolutely. It's just an issue that we (my wife and I) have discussed quite a bit and you happened near enough to it to detonate a long exegesis. That picture is one of the more horrible things I've seen lately. Up til now, the most pierced person I'd seen was a former upstairs neighbor. When he and his girlfriend got to going at it (usually at 3 AM), her feline yowling combined with the rythmic kachink kachink kachink of his nose-and-various-other-rings finally convinced me that yes we did have enough to make a down payment on our own house after all.
While I'm pretty sure I have different standards over what I would and wouldn't want my kids to do--both as adolescents and as adults--I agree with your overall point here. Too many people just turn their kids over to broadcast and other media. I honestly believe that most parents today truly do not know their own children. Not really, anyway. Most people know that TV is the most popular babysitter/nanny by far; yet far too few people seem to regard this with an appopriate level of concern. [/QUOTE] That's just...well, that's just sad.
Good to see that you are serious about your kids doing their homework. But your kids need to take a break from it as well. Otherwise you will end up with cranky kids.
Do you allow your kids to play outside for a little while so that they get that distraction. You kids need to take a break from studying.
Homework or doing assignments for our children is not right our children may be null because we parents always do there homework let them do their homework they may ask questions but consider their answer first let them think harder