1. With your partner if you have one, sit down and think about what you want to achieve in the coming school year. Parents usually tell me that their goals for their children go far beyond academic knowledge and skills.
As important as it is for children to master academic content, parents are often even more concerned about their children developing sensible habits: that they learn the habit of doing their best, that they become confident and self-reliant learners. The qualities that parents most often tell me they value are motivation, curiosity, resilience, impulse-control, teamwork, problem-solving, resourcefulness, and social skills.
Once you’re clear about what you want the coming school year to look like, not only for your children but also for yourselves as parents, you will be able more easily to focus your attention on what you can do to achieve your aims.
2. Prioritise teaching and training your children to be more organised. Getting children into the habit of being organised achieves several goals. It helps them to be more successful at school, it reduces their anxiety, it improves their self-esteem, and it helps them to become more mature.
For children and teens, there are two main aspects of organisation: taking care of belongings, and remembering to do the right thing at the right time. When children or teens regularly misplace things or are often late (or almost late), here’s what doesn’t work to build good habits: reminding, lecturing, or threatening dire consequences. And even if you’re willing to keep reminding your child or willing to tidy up after her, her teachers certainly won’t be willing.
If you’ve been trying for years to instil some degree of organisation, with very little to show for it, you may he wondering how to teach and train this key habit. A very effective strategy is a ‘think-through’. Instead of telling your child, yet again, what he should do, which often comes across as nagging, ask your child to tell you what he should do, and when he should do it, and where he should do it, and how he should do it.
This strategy is called a think-through because the parent has to think carefully about what questions to ask, and the child or teen has to think carefully about their answers:
‘What time do you need to finish breakfast in order to leave the house on time?’
‘Where would be a good place to put your pencil case after you’ve finished your homework?’
‘How can you make sure that you’ll remember your PE kit on Tuesdays?’
‘What can you do to keep your project from getting wrinkled when you bring it to school?’
The more often your child or teen tells you the answers to questions like these, the easier it is for him to visualise himself doing it right. Visualisation turns into action. Very soon you will see new, more mature habits of organisation starting to blossom. Remember to Descriptively Praise each little step in the right direction.
Each think-through should last only one minute, so that it doesn’t feel like an ordeal, either for you or for your child. And only ask the think-through questions during a calm moment, not when you’re exasperated because he forgot his exercise book yet again.
3. Keep school mornings as calm as possible. A peaceful morning sets children up for a more successful day, compared to a rushed, stressful morning. It’s a myth that school-day mornings need to be rushed and stressful. There are many strategies that can help children and teens (and parents) to have a pleasant, positive start to the day. Here are a few things you can do:
If your children are likely to complain or argue about any aspect of what to wear, start a new routine: at bedtime the night before, have them lay out their clothes for the following day (maybe right before or right after getting into their pyjamas), and the rule is that they are not allowed to change their minds in the morning.
Also, if a child is struggling with any aspect of getting dressed for school, or is perhaps resisting, have her practise a bit every day, but not when you’re stressed or in a rush.
A well-rested child is a more cooperative and more cheerful child. So put your children to bed earlier - yes, they will complain at first, until they get used to the new routine. Within a week or two you will notice much less grumpiness, distractibility, or dawdling in the mornings.
4. To avoid last-minute panic in the mornings, plan packed lunches and after-school snacks in advance. Ask each child to choose their favourites from a list of healthy options.
Make the time for children to help you prepare their packed lunches and their snacks; children are much more likely to eat food that they have helped to prepare.
5. Often parents feel that the summer holidays should be a complete break from anything to do with school. Unfortunately, this can make for problems in the new term: the very idea of homework may come as an unpleasant shock to the system.
If you detect any hint of resistance to homework (including learned helplessness), be willing, during the first few weeks of the new term, to sit with your children as they do their homework (or as they complain about their homework). Remember that complaining, arguing, and refusing are often signs of anxiety and shaky confidence, and we all feel braver when we have someone to keep us company.
It’s quite possible that a lot of forgetting has taken place over the summer. If your child acts clueless about facts or skills or procedures that he used to know, resist the temptation to remind him. That would only reinforce his belief that he can’t remember the information.
Instead, ask him to tell you which bits he does remember, and don’t accept ‘I don’t know’. Don’t do his thinking for him! When he has to rack his brains to remember, or when he has to take a sensible guess, not only is this strengthening his brain’s ability to think and to remember, but it is also building his self-confidence and resilience.
To help children and teens to do their best with homework and schoolwork, put some focus every day on ‘micro-skills’, which are the smaller sub-skills that are components of larger skills. Here are some examples: having multiplication facts thoroughly memorised is an important micro-skill for mastering fractions, decimals, percents, and then algebra. For writing stories and essays, some important micro-skills are legible handwriting, accurate spelling and punctuation, interesting vocabulary.
You’ll probably know which micro-skills your child could benefit from practising. Here’s what I recommend: Choose three micro-skills that you would really like to see your child improve this term. Have her spend five minutes a day practising each of these three micro-skills, for a total of fifteen minutes. This should happen before homework, while your child’s brain is still fresh.
Expect your children and teens to complain about this new routine at first. They won’t want to spend any more time than necessary on anything resembling homework, especially if it hasn’t been set by the school. But persevere. Soon you will see a big improvement, both in the quality of their work, and also in the pride they take in their work.
(Micro-skills typically get rusty over the six weeks of the summer holidays if you didn’t set aside regular time for practice. That’s why I always recommend half an hour daily of micro-skills practice over the holidays – after breakfast and before fun. Once your children get over their initial shock and outrage, they’ll soon accept this as a new habit, and you’ll see an increase in skills and confidence.)
Whatever issues your child might be having with homework, my book, ‘Calmer, Easier, Happier Homework’ can point you towards a solution. This book is available on Amazon in a print version or an ebook or an audiobook.
6. Many families have term-time rules about screen time: when, where, how much, what, etc. These rules and routines tend to be loosened or suspended altogether during the summer holidays. You may find that your children and teens resist going back to the screen time rules that were in place before the summer.
Nowadays, too many children and teens are showing unmistakeable signs of screen dependency. We now know a lot about the negative effects of various types of screen time, and of too many hours of screen time. So we need to get back in charge. Be strong. Have the courage of your convictions. Children can be very persuasive because they are experts at knowing what they want. We, the parents, need to be brave. We may not be experts, but we know better than our children do what’s good for them.
7. You can also use think-throughs to help children practise sensible ways to respond when faced with tricky friendship issues. This is much more effective than simply telling our children what to do; that’s because often they’re not really listening to our wise words, especially if they’ve heard it before, and if it sounds like a lecture. But when your child is the one who is saying what he should or could do, he is listening to himself:
‘What’s the school rule about what you should do if someone teases you or insults you?’
‘If your friend doesn’t want to play with you one day, what would be a good thing to do?’
‘At break time, how can you let your classmates know that you want to play with them?’
‘What if you want to play a certain game, and the others want to play a different game?’
8. If parents aren’t careful, after-school clubs, homework, music practice, dinner, and screen time can easily fill the whole afternoon and evening right up until bedtime. Let’s remember that children and teens (and parents as well) need a daily dose of unstructured and guilt-free down-time. Without this daily safety valve, stress builds up, often leading to anxiety, or to a lack of cooperation, or even to meltdowns.
As much as your children may enjoy their extra-curricular activities, or as important as it may be for them to revise French verb endings, nothing is more important than this daily unstructured time. It’s a time when your child is not being entertained or distracted or told what to do. He’s thrown back on his own resources. Ring-fence this free time, at least half an hour each day, and longer at the weekends.
9. Children want, need, deserve, and thrive on regular one-on-one time with each parent, which is often called Special Time. You were probably able to manage this during the summer holidays, when there were far fewer to-dos on the agenda. But it’s just as vital during term-time.
One very important plus about daily Special Time (even just fifteen minutes, if that’s all you can squeeze in) is that it helps motivate children to want to please you and to want to make you proud. Even children and teens who don’t seem to care about spending one-on-one time with a parent will benefit hugely from Special Time as a daily, consistent routine.
10. We know that some children are more anxious, whereas others are more laid-back or more confident. A child with a tendency to worry is also often a child with a tendency to hold things in. So parents may not recognise the signs of anxiety in the first few weeks of the new school year: reluctance to talk about school, complaining in the morning about a stomach ache or sore throat, delaying tactics at bedtime, saying ‘I hate school’, claiming not to have any friends, making a fuss about anything and everything, even about things that are completely unrelated to school.
It’s easy to understand why a child would be worried if he’s starting at a new school. But even if your child is returning to the same school as last term, anxiety can flare up after six weeks of no school. He’s had the whole of the long summer holidays to forget that school is OK. You may find that he’s worried, all over again, about things like: will the new teacher be very strict, will the work be too hard, will he get in trouble if he forgets the new teacher’s way of doing things, will any of his friends from last year be in his class this year, etc, etc.
You can help set your child’s mind at rest so that he can greet the new term with greater enthusiasm and confidence. Find out all the specifics that you possibly can, and let your child know the answers. Even if it turns out that the reality is not to his liking, he will cope better when he knows.
Make a list with your child of all the things your child may be thinking about school but isn’t saying. Do plenty of ‘what if’ think-throughs with your child about all the unknowns. When your child can visualise himself handling tricky situations, this will go a long way towards reducing his anxiety.
