Even though teens are seeking independence, parental involvement is an important ingredient for academic success. Teens do better in school when parents support their academic efforts. Attending your school's open house or back-to-school night is a great way to get to know your teen's teachers and their expectations. School administrators may discuss school-wide programs and policies, and post-high school options that parents and guardians of juniors and seniors need to know about. Attending parent-teacher conferences is another way to stay informed, although in high school, staff usually set these up only when parental involvement is needed to address issues like behavior problems, falling below grade-level expectations, or alternatively, benefiting from advanced class work.
If your teen has special learning or behavioral needs, meetings can be scheduled with teachers and other school staff to consider setting up or revising individualized education plans IEPs , education plans , or gifted education plans.
Keep in mind that parents or guardians can request meetings with teachers, principals, school counselors, or other school staff any time during the school year. Knowing the physical layout of the school building and grounds can help you connect with your teen when you talk about the school day. It's good to know the location of the main office, school nurse, cafeteria, gym, athletic fields, auditorium, and special classes. Many teachers maintain their own websites that provide access to textbooks and other resources, and detail homework assignments, and test and quiz dates.
Special resources for parents and students are also usually available on the district, school, or teacher websites. During the high school years, homework gets more intense and grades become critical for college plans. Amid all these changes, many teens are learning how to balance academics with extracurricular activities, social lives, and jobs. An important way to help is to make sure your teen has a quiet, well-lit, distraction-free place to study that's stocked with supplies.
Distraction-free means no phone, TV, or websites other than homework-related resources. Be sure to check in from time to time to make sure that your teen hasn't gotten distracted.
Regularly sit down with your teen to go over class loads and make sure they're balanced, and help him or her stick to a homework and study schedule.
Encourage your teen to ask for help when it's needed. Most teachers are available for extra help before or after school, and also might be able to recommend other resources. A nutritious breakfast fuels up teens and gets them ready for the day. In general, teens who eat breakfast have more energy and do better in school. You can help boost your teen's attention span, concentration, and memory by providing breakfast foods that are rich in whole grains, fiber, and protein, as well as low in added sugar.
If your teen is running late some mornings, send along fresh fruit, nuts, yogurt, or a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Many schools provide nutritious breakfast options before the first bell. But early school start times — on top of schedules packed with classes, homework, extracurricular activities, and friends — mean that it's common for teens to not get enough sleep. Lack of sleep is linked to decreased attentiveness, decreased short-term memory, inconsistent performance, and delayed response time.
Most teens also have a change in their sleep patterns , with their bodies telling them to stay up later at night and wake up later in the morning. Ideally, teens should try to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning.
You can help by reminding your teen before bedtime to turn off the phone and limit video games and TV. Napping during the day can also push bedtimes back, so it's best if teens don't nap after school. Many teens try to catch up on sleep on weekends.
But try to keep your teen's sleep and wake times within 2 hours of what they are during the week. Learning and mastering the skills of getting organized, staying focused, and seeing work through to the end will help teens in just about everything they do. But this is not usually explicitly taught in high school, so teens can benefit from some parental guidance with organization and time-management skills. Social media has had a profound effect on the daily lives of teenagers.
Being constantly plugged in introduces unrelenting pressure on students to maintain their online presence around the clock. Social media isn't just an after-school phenomenon. The undercover students were shocked to observe that in many classrooms, most students were on their phones for most of the time. Beryl New, the principal of Highland Park High School when the show was filmed, said that even though social-media sites were blocked on the school's network, staff members were helpless in stopping students from accessing them on their own devices.
And teachers said it was a daily struggle to get students to focus on classwork. Worse yet, it's almost impossible for teachers and school staff members to police cyberbullying, as incidents that start in the classroom can reverberate around the school within moments and continue snowballing at home. It took something singular — granular even — and it's just ballooned overnight until it becomes a major issue.
The consequences of such pressure can be devastating for girls, such as if the images leak online and they're shamed by their peers. It shouldn't come as a surprise that partly because of the advent of smartphones and social media, depression and suicide rates are skyrocketing among American teenagers. Part of the reason is that social media can seem to quantify a student's popularity and define where they fall on the social totem pole. And it's just doubled the impact of what it was before.
Daniel, a youth pastor who posed as an undercover student, said it was easy for students to take personally the responses they get to a social-media post. Nicolette, an undercover student who got pregnant in high school, said that at the time it was "very taboo" and she was "ostracized. You're not going to be able to go to college. You're going to drop out of high school,'" she told Business Insider. The school's changing attitudes toward teen pregnancy inspired Nicolette to create a group to lend support to female students who were pregnant or supporting children.
Granted mine was a little different than your average, apple pie, run-of-the-mill public school since it was in one of the most progressive cities in America. Prom is an opportunity for women to reminisce on their youth when they are old and saggy and an excuse for people to get laid, high drunk, or some combination of the three.
It literally has no other function. This is why so many students continue to get pregnant, STDs, or just simply false information about these important issues. On the same note, they also are just as clueless as to how to prevent bullying, drug addiction and mental illness.
That is why they make you go to so many assemblies where they explain to you what it is. The superstars in high school will continue to be superstars, and the losers will continue to be losers. So unless you actively try to divorce yourself from your high school identity, it will very easily creep into your college identity, and will make you who you will become as an adult.
Everyone is insecure. They are having the time of their lives. Just deal with it.
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