Five ways to help your procrastinating kid
For some of us, time is elastic. A week’s vacation lasts two days and a boring hour-long meeting takes at least three hours. When we looked at our watch ten minutes ago, it was 10:42 — so it’s still 10:42.
Naturally, these “time fluid” people get paired up in families and working relationships with people who look at their watch at 7:55 and wonder why all the others are late for the 8:00. The “time firm” and the “time fluid,” together forever. Everyone wins!
It is incredibly frustrating to be the parent of a child who would seemingly never turn in their work on time (and maybe never get it done in the first place) without intervention. Not only does it make many afternoons and evenings a joyless slog, it leads to worry that your child will still be lost and helpless as an adult. I am guessing that fighting over homework was not part of the life you envisioned as you beheld your newborn infant for the first time.
Below, five tips to help make things better. Ready?
Start fresh. Try not to carry the weight of yesterday and all the days before that. As much as possible, let go of “You always…” and “You never…” and “I wish you would just…” Keep it light. Believe that your child wants to do well and wants to please you. Transformation is possible when we make room for it.
Use the Pomodoro Technique. Yes, “pomodoro” is Italian for “tomato.” It’s a reference to those tomato kitchen timers. Basically, you set a timer for 25 minutes, take a break, and then do another “Pomodoro" (another 25 minute session).
For children and adolescents, a Pomodoro should be much shorter; the timer should be set to only 5 to 7 minutes. And don’t skimp on those breaks!
The fact that this is a world-famous “revolutionary time management system” reminds us how strange our brains are. With little hacks like this, we can make our quirks work for us instead of against us.
Keep a weekly routine. Ana Homayoun, in her book That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week, advises keeping a dedicated place in the house to do schoolwork — and a dedicated time of day. Many busy families struggle with this, however. If you have trouble keeping a daily routine, try a weekly one that maps out, in advance, when work is done each Monday, each Tuesday, and so on. Ideally, this plan is one that you and your child will create together.
For instance, if there’s soccer practice from 4 to 6 PM each Monday and Wednesday, homework will have to happen from 3:00 - 3:30 and 7:00 - 8:00 on those days. Meanwhile, homework can get done between 3:30 and 5:00 on Tuesday and Thursday.
Planning ahead of time will allow you and your child to anticipate obstacles and make better use of tiny silvers of time.
Make a plan. Once you and your child have mapped out the weekly routine, you’ll need to sit down each week and figure out where the specific assignments fit into that plan. Too many of us say to ourselves, “Okay, I’ll just do the work until it’s done.” This is a recipe for misery, because The Work remains what productivity expert David Allen calls “an amorphous blob” — it is poorly defined and we don’t have a real sense of the amount of time it will take or the level of commitment we’re actually signed up for. The Work is the scary bogeyman in the shadows. This makes us uneasy and leads directly to the avoidant behaviors of procrastination.
Instead, we want to estimate how long (i.e., how many Pomodoros) we expect each assignment to take and “assign that assignment” to a specific time slot in our weekly calendar.
This accomplishes a few things:
It gives us an explicit opportunity to do the “meta work” of figuring out the scale and scope of each assignment without the pressure of having to do the assignment itself right there and then.
It strengthens our emotional commitment to each assignment because we now have a dedicated place on our calendar where it will go.
It allows us to compare our estimated time to the time the assignment actually took, leading to both pleasant surprises (“Wow, that was easier than I thought!”) and important realizations (“We may need a math tutor. That shouldn’t have taken three hours”). And the more kids practice estimation, the better they will get at understanding time.
Make sure you can all see the light at the end of the tunnel. Parkinson’s law tells us that the amount of time work takes will expand to fill the time available. Some kids procrastinate over the course of the week, forcing a reckoning the night before the assignment is due. Others use a “procrastination bulldozer,” ruining an entire afternoon by trying every tactic imaginable to delay a ten-minute worksheet. In both cases, we can help kids (and ourselves) by showing them the big picture that they may be missing. “When you get this done, we can use the rest of our time this afternoon to go to the playground.”
Still stuck? If the work consists of a dozen questions, give your child an M&M or a sticker after each one. Karen Pryor, in her brilliant book Don’t Shoot the Dog, tells the story of how she got herself on the bus to an evening class by giving herself tiny squares of dark chocolate at strategic intervals.
It works, and it’s not a bribe. A bribe is when you try to coax someone into doing something by offering a payment; here, we’re providing a little reward for a job well done. What matters is not the candy (or the trip to the park), but the satisfaction of earning it.
I hope you can see that these tactics for helping procrastinators are adapted from ones that adults use. In other words, the challenges of procrastination is not unique to children, and there need not be any shame in it.
There are many causes of procrastination and many great resources to help you delve into the underlying issues that may be present (perfectionism, learning disabilities, fear of failure, an attempt to assert control over one’s life, and so on). Here, it was my intent to present some simple, practical tips to help your child manage procrastination and have a better experience with schoolwork. I hope it is helpful to you.