Your child brings home good grades semester after semester. Suddenly, his grades drop and the teachers express concern that he isn’t doing his homework. You know better. Left unchecked, he begins lying, forging your signature on school papers. How do you regain control?
For elementary school aged children, the key to control is repetition and consistency. Children of this age need to know what to expect everyday. The second key to control is to instill into your child the importance of responsibility. He has to understand there is a direct correlation between his actions and the impending results. For example, if he lies and says his homework is done in order to watch TV, and you find out later it wasn’t, the most appropriately correlated result to his actions would be to take away his TV privileges.
Here is one plan meant to steer your child back on the right path.
If the situation has progressed to poor grades, lying, forgery, rushing through chores and homework to get to things he wants most, take away everything—his TV, Nintendo, his right to have friends over or to visit friends, his allowance, the computer, his control over his free time. Make it clear his own actions have led him to this almost prison-like status because he can’t be trusted to make appropriate decisions. Structure homework by the clock, not by the assignment. Make it clear he will be doing homework an hour every night whether he brings home enough homework to fill that hour or not. Set a timer. Every time he leaves the kitchen table—by forcing him to do his homework out in the open, it reduces his opportunities to goof off—or stops working, add five minutes to the timer. You can supplement his schoolwork with Internet printouts. EdHelper is one website offering tons of subject specific printouts. There are numerous website that accept writing submissions from children such as Stone Soup. Another idea is simply reading the encyclopedia on a specified subject and writing a report. Your son’s teacher may be willing to provide additional printouts. It never hurts to ask. Work with the teacher. Set new rules. Control the flow of homework to and from school before it affects his grades. Let the teacher and your child know he is expected to have the teacher sign off on his homework every day, and once a week, he is to bring a note home from her stating all his homework is turned in. Make sure they both understand it is his responsibility to go to the teacher for signatures, not hers to remind him to do so. Have in a place a set of consequences for each time he forgets. For example, after his hour of homework is over, he has to write two words and definitions of your choosing. Good words to start with are discipline, responsibility. From there, expand to words with long definitions until you see progress. Most importantly, provide the teacher with several means of communicating with you, including phone numbers, email addresses, notes. Check your child’s progress with her often. Make a pest out of yourself, if you must, but make it clear that you want to be kept in the loop about your child’s education. After homework is chore time. He should have chores at least until dinner. If he has his own bathroom, every time you find dirty laundry on the floor, he has to clean the entire bathroom again. He can make his bed, sweep the front steps, rake leaves, scrub the kitchen floor. None of these duties will hurt him and it will fill the time he might normally be using to watch TV, play with friends, or play video games. After dinner, he stays in the kitchen and reads until bedtime while the rest of the family goes on about their normal routine. If he insists on popping into the living room, just to ask one more question, he goes to bed early. If you are accustomed to having desert after dinner, continue to do so, only he doesn’t get any. He is on restriction, not you. He needs to understand that his actions cause him to miss out, not the whole family. Leave him on restriction until the next report card or mid-term report. Only after you see an improvement in his grades will you very gradually allow him to earn back his privileges.
Only by following through with each step will your child get the message—either he lives up to your expectations or he loses out.
If you feel your child’s problem is more serious than a lack of structure or taking responsibility for his own actions, consult a professional. Ask for a referral from your school, your doctor, or a family friend. It is better to deal with the problem now. What starts as a homework problem can escalate into skipping school, drug problems, stealing. It can happen. Take the first step to ward off future problems. Take control of your child and teach him to be responsible for his own actions today.
