2 Child Help Advices
• Help your child learn to handle pressure. With the demands of more homework, exams, papers, and school projects, your child may feel a good deal of pressure, especially in high school. Provide support to help your child handle these requirements. Your teenager may need help with managing his time, setting goals and priorities, developing effective study skills, or tackling tougher subjects. If you can’t provide this help on your own, you might consider seeking help from a teacher, school counselor, or tutor. Study groups and tutoring are helpful for many students. Summer programs offering academic assistance are also available. Talk with your teenager when he seems to be experiencing stressful times. Encourage your teenager to take short breaks, get some sleep, exercise, or hang out with friends. Help him learn to balance work and relaxation.
• Encourage your child to keep trying hard, especially in the subjects that she finds the most difficult or challenging. As the course work
becomes more challenging in the upper grades, students sometimes decide that they “aren’t good” in math, science, foreign languages, or writing. As a result, they don’t try as hard in these classes. It’s important to remind your son or daughter that all subjects are important.
If your child is struggling, talk with the teacher. Some teachers offer study groups or extra help before or after school. The teacher may also be able to recommend a tutor.
• Help your teenager learn to manage his time. Homework demands increase dramatically starting in middle school, and so do social activities. Your teenager may need help learning to balance the demands of sports, clubs, homework, social life, free time, and a job if he is working. He may need help making choices, setting priorities, or knowing when to limit activities. This may even include deciding to temporarily drop an activity. Learning to balance work and free time takes practice.
• Limit TV, electronic games, and time spent on the Internet.
• Make sure your teenager starts off the day with breakfast. All families are busy and few have time for a sit-down breakfast together. But at least try to send your teenager out the door with a bagel, a banana, or a protein bar to give her the energy she needs to make it through the morning. Or if the school offers breakfast, make sure she has money and will arrive at school in time to buy breakfast.
• See that your teenager gets enough sleep. Experts recommend an average of about nine hours of sleep a night for adolescents. This is an ideal that’s often difficult to achieve, but it’s worth trying to coax your teenager to bed at a reasonable hour. Studies show that teenagers who get close to this amount of sleep do better in school.
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