“Don’t be afraid to let your kid face the consequences of bad decisions. You have to let him fail so he can learn he wants to succeed.”
The advice was given to me in a semi-private forum where I’d complained out loud about the epic four-hour-long homework session with Link last Sunday. I wanted to answer back that they’d misunderstood the dilemma, that my son was not being defiant, but every answer I could compose sounded like I was self-defensively missing their point or would require so much background information that I would bore everyone.
Yes parents need to let kids fail, but before they allow it they first have to make sure that the kid actually has the tools to succeed. In this case, Link does not. In theory he ought to. By 10th grade kids should have already learned how to track homework and have a basic comprehension that work must be completed before it is due. Link does not. His entire educational experience has been about adjusting, recalibrating assignments, and letting him make up work he misunderstood or did not finish. Those adjustments were necessary at the time, but now is the time to learn different skills. He needs to learn to turn in all of his assignments on time, that if an assignment needs accommodation that must be agreed upon in advance. He needs to learn to read every paper handed to him and to not wait for adults to explain what he should do. He needs to learn to figure out what he doesn’t understand in class and then ask questions about it.
Truth be told, his current teachers would let him continue as he has been. It says right there on his IEP that he’s allowed extra time on assignments. They would accept late work and not dock it down points. They would be kind and explain. They would lighten the work load when Link seemed overwhelmed. There was a time where that willingness was a saving grace for us. Now it is not what Link needs for his long term growth. What he needs is for me to sit next to him, for four hours, not moving until the journal entry is written, because it is due the next day. Link sat next to me, wanting to do the assignment, wanting to please me, yet wrestling with himself because part of his brain was resisting the work with all of its might. So right now I’m heavily involved in tracking Link’s work and making him do it. Once he is in the habit of doing all assignments on time, once he realizes that is a thing it is possible to do, then I will step back and let him succeed or fail at it under his own power. Link needs to learn that he is strong enough to do hard things, because all of his life people have been adapting for him and that has made him believe himself weak.
I find it interesting that I got similarly hands-on with Kiki at this point in her Sophomore year as well. By January of that year I stepped back and let her handle things again. Already I can see improvement in how Link is doing. The battles Link is having with himself are smaller and more easily won. Most importantly, I can feel that this path is right, so we’ll keep walking.
Sandra, I would love a how-to-navigate-Alpine-School-District-with-an-ADD/ADHD child post sometime. My seven-year-old is starting to need some more attention with his ADD issues, and I’d like to get him evaluated by a school psychologist. What kind of advice to you have for someone just starting on this path?
Excellent idea. Let me see what I can do. It may take a week or so in order to get it right.
Thank you–I will look forward to it.
I have actively been where Link is right now.
For the longest of time (starting way back in grade school) I fought writing assignments like I was going for the championship medal in Last Man Standing. I fought, I avoided, I “lost work”…
This followed me all through school. I never really got any serious help (because “we know you can do the work” is not, in fact, helpful to someone who utterly refuses to accept it). My grades suffered, but I was able to pass mostly because I was freaking brilliant and could blow tests out of the water and could BS a paper at the last minute like a demigod.
I’m 35 now, and it was just this last semester that I finally started to beat it. 5-10 pages papers would fly out of me because I finally realized that a) I had a voice, it could be compelling, I just had to use that instead of what I thought the instructor wanted, b) realized that I could, in fact, pick a topic that interested me and form it to fit the required guidelines and most importantly c) If I sat down early and just pushed a little and got a start going (or even better – started just after the beginning and then came back to form a beginning that fit what I had finished writing) the paper – at least the first draft – got done quick, revising was easy (since this way I wasn’t so married to my words), and the assignment got done with loads of time to spare.
I’m not saying this will help Link, not by any means. I’m a special kind of messed up for a whole list of reasons, most of which aren’t even in Link’s universe (for one, mom and dad divorced and it wasn’t exactly pleasant), but he at least sounds like he has a little of what I did – a mountain of smarts that sort of fights itself.
If you have not (and with two writers as parents, you probably have but I’ll just say it anyways), encourage him to try small papers complete separate from school. Give him a couple of weeks to write two pages on something that is sort of or almost something he’s really interested in, and see if he can’t work his voice and his own likes into something that fits your guidelines. This one trick alone would have allowed me to pass ENGL 110 about 8 tries ago.
Oh, one more trick that sounds moronic but works for me – whenever he is writing on the computer (does he do that, or do they require longhand?) and he’s told “three pages, double spaced, blah blah blah”, have him write it single spaced. Once he works himself to a stop, then format to double-spaced.
I don’t even know what is messed up in my skull, but when I hear “6 pages, double-spaced” I think “My God, there is no way I can write 6 double-spaced pages”, but the exact same brain that thinks that load of malarky will absolutely think “I can write 3 pages single-spaced, piece of cake!”
And it will think those thought within second of each other, and somehow I am unable to tell that they are the same darn thing.
Then there are tricks of font-selection, but I will leave those for him to discover. 🙂
The best of luck to the lad. I know he’s got better support than I ever did.
This sounds so familiar. Different kid, different age, different assignments, but the dynamic sounds parallel to some of the epic homework battles I’ve had with my son. I think it may be hard for someone who’s never experienced it to understand how a child can sit there, agonized, desperately *wanting* to do the assignment and yet somehow unable to find the way.
Chalk up another vote of interest for a How-to-navigate-Alpine-School-District post. We’re home schooling for the next few years, but we’ll eventually need to reintegrate…
“Yes parents need to let kids fail, but before they allow it they first have to make sure that the kid actually has the tools to succeed.”
I agree with this SO MUCH. Sometimes I feel like authority figures don’t prime the child for success well enough before they allow the child to fail.