Would anyone like to buy a teenager, cheap? (long)

The BBQ Pit
1

Before anyone asks, she’s not really for sale.

She’s 15, a freshman in high school, a very bright kid, and lately I find myself wanting to thwack her upside the head with a Nerf bat. I got her progress report from school and she’s failing honors classes. Not because the work is too hard for her; not, as I briefly suspected, because school has always come easy to her before and she hasn’t developed any good study skills. No, she’s failing English, algebra, biology and PE for STUPID STUPID STUPID reasons! Like “forgetting” to hand in her homework - or “forgetting” to DO her homework. Or “forgetting” to change into her gym uniform.

I had conferences with the teachers. She’s a likeable kid, they all agree on that. Not disrespectful. Hangs around with good kids, no druggies or even mildly suspicious characters. Participates in class discussions. And except for a math glitch that the algebra teacher helped her straighten out, she isn’t really having any academic troubles.

But the BULLSHIT - when she was asked if she handed in the English project due yesterday (I could plainly see the big ol’ ZERO in the teacher’s gradebook) the kid replied, “I think I handed it in…” with this fakey innocent face. Yep… just like she thought she cleaned her room, when really she just shoved everything in the closet (including some wet towels, clean folded clothes I had just put on her bed and a pile of dirty laundry.) “Oh…” she said vaguely. “Well, I thought I put the towels in the laundry room…”

“What is your problem??”
“I dunno…”

So anyway, we gave her some strategies. She has an assignment book - she shows it to me nightly now. But, tonight, I asked her when she got home from school if she had homework. “Yes, algebra and English,” she said. “What about all that make up work you have in biology?” “Oh, yeah, that too.” “OK, so you have algebra, English and biology?” “Yeah.”

So she did the English. After school, and then some more after dinner. With frequent breaks for snacks, dinner, and the potty. :rolleyes: Then she said, “I’m done, and I’m tired, I’m going to go to bed.” I asked her if she’d done her algebra. She said she’d done it in study hall at school. “Well, then where is it?” I asked. She said it’s in her locker. Then why did she tell me she had algebra? “I forgot I had done it.”

What about the biology? Well, it seems that the teacher, who gave her a list of missing assignments (14 out of 26 MISSING) didn’t give her the make-up work yet. “Did you ASK her for it? You only have until Thursday to turn it all in before the grading period ends.” “Well, I think I did.”

ARRRRRRRRRGH!!!

She’s fifteen. I am not going to do her work for her, and I’m not going to stand over her every second and supervise. I can check up on her to a point, but this is her responsibility. I will also not let her off the hook when the consequences of her irresponsibility come upside her head like a Nerf bat. BUT - these grades are going to affect the classes she can take next year, and she’s bright enough that she’d be bored in “lesser” classes, which could set up a great vicious cycle of under achievement and discouragement. Any suggestions on how to let her reap the consequences without having them be “permanent record” consequences that’ll screw her up in future schooling??

2

Assignment book is good.

I’d see if it’s alright with her teachers to check up with them once every week or two to make sure she’s handing in everything. Set consequences and follow through. No sports, phone, TV, internet, whatever she’s into.

It’s not too early to bring up the spectre of college admissions, either.

3

Consequences. Holding the purse strings, so to speak, gives you some leverage. Sounds like some things have changed for her, if she was previously a good student, and then lately things are different.

Anything from puberty problems (boyfriends, popularity, all that lovely teen stuff) on up to the “deep” stuff like possible drug use or experimentation.

You don’t say what her social life is like, but if it were me, I’d start there. When I had trouble with my daughter (now 25 WHEW! don’t worry it gets better when they hit about 17), it was some of her friends who were a bad influence.

No telling what’s caused the change, but getting to the bottom of what’s going on in her life, rather than schoolwork (as illogical as that may sound) may get you further than trying to kill yourself “monitoring” her and so on.

Good luck, having teens makes you (as Roseanne once noted) understand why some animals eat their young.

4

Sounds like she is either depressed, or going thru a typical teen rebellious stage, or both.

5

I’m sure it has something to do with standard teen rebellion, hormones and other miscellaneous crap. It’s not drugs, and it’s not her friends - I know that sounds exactly like what someone in denial would say, but if she were doing drugs - even very minor experimentation - she’d have to be awfully damn clever about it. She leaves the house every schoolday morning at 6:45 and I can see her get on the bus from my window. The school has automated phone notification if any classes are missed, so she’s not ditching class. She gets back on the bus after school, and the bus lets her off in front of the house, so basically she doesn’t have TIME to do drugs. She’s not doing them on weekends, either, because we’re either here with her, or she’s out with us. She’s had the same group of friends since 5th grade, and we’re friendly with all their parents - and her friends are almost all A students, too. Dating at this point has been limited to being dropped off at the local Cineplex, where I can SEE her go in the front door, and I’m one of those annoying Moms who checks to see what time the movie ends, watches her walk out the door of the theater, and questions her about the movie after.

After school stuff - she has homework (ha) and piano & voice lessons once a week. Other than that, it’s either orthodontist appointments, household chores (she has to empty the dishwasher and reload it, set the table and clear, and empty the garbage - nothing too taxing) or vegging with a book or in front of the TV. She doesn’t do much phone chatting, although she has been grounded from the computer rather frequently for IMing wth her pals and fucking around on Neopets instead of doing biology research online (goofball didn’t know I could check her Google history.)

Her boyfriend is a geeky artsy type, and he’s a junior, so they have no classes together, but they do have lunch the same period. They’ve been “going out” since October, and so far they’ve had two movie dates, he’s been here for two parties, and we took him along to a theater show last weekend, so HE’S not hogging her time, either. Plus, he has six brothers and sisters, so very little phone access, and no computer.

If I could think of ANYTHING that would be contributing to this, I’d be on it.

6

I almost hate to say this, but “overbearing parent(s),” perhaps?

Maybe she’s found the only thing in her life she thinks she has control over, and has chosen to exert that control. Sounds like TV advice, but there you have it.

Her life doesn’t sound very fun.

7

It’s OK, you can say it. I would say more overprotective than overbearing, but from her point of view I might be a raging control freak. I thought picking and choosing which battles to fight was a good course of action, so when she wanted to dye her hair pink, I said yes. She wears clothes that make me cringe, but only because they’re ugly gothicy stuff, not because they’re revealing - she’s pretty modest so that hasn’t been an issue - and the only time I object to what she wears is if we’re going to be with my husband’s parents, who object to EVERYTHING. I don’t censor her music, even took her to a couple of concerts, and don’t censor her reading material, although I also read some of it when I think it’s highly questionable.

She loves the Renaissance Faire, as do I, and we go every weekend in the summer. The group of parents that I mentioned gets together pretty regularly with the kids, but they go off into the basement or den to watch scary movies while we all stand around chatting or making pizzas.

I realize that I’m leaving her father (my husband) out of this a bit, but he’s neither an absent father nor a strict one, and he genuinely enjoys her company - actually, so do I, when I’m not pissed off about her grades. She’s a good kid, and she’s got a wicked sharp sense of humor, she’s talented and completely adorable on the whole. It’s likely that she is slightly spoiled, as the only child of fairly well-off parents, but I’m not sure that has anything to do with her school work.

8

Sounds like a bit of rebellion then… I mean, if she’s an honor student, and had been this great student for so long, now all of a sudden she’s bored. She’s not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel from all of her endeavors. Plus, she’s 15, it’s normal to rebell in some way or another at this age.

At any rate, as I said before, if it were me, I’d go to how she feels and what’s going on with her, rather than mentioning or worrying about school work right now.

Best of luck on this, I know it’s got to be so frustrating.

9

Oh man, I was your daughter about four or five years ago (although not a girl… or yours).

I don’t really have any advice, I just kind of grew out of it. For the most part.

Good luck with getting her to live up to her potential.

10

I went through a phase of not doing my homework for about a semester when I was 13 or 14. Turns out all that was needed was for my parents to kill any free time I had (after my homework and finishing all of the work I didn’t do for a whole semester in algebra). Lets see, they had me rake leaves, pulling weeds, copying pages out of the dictionary (the worst would be when I was done with a page that took me hours to complete and my father would look it over, rip it up, then just toss it in the garbage). A few weeks of that and she will make sure she doesn’t miss an assignment for quite a while.

11

I can’t really offer any advice either, but I do have two rather pointless observations:

  • Why is it that kids always start rebelling around the time when it most matters, i.e. just when grades/school start to count towards college? Or maybe I should rephrase that - why do colleges start the clock around the time when most kids act up?

  • This isn’t meant as a slam on Canvas at all, but…I always wondered if every parent says the other kid is the “bad influence”, then who’s the “other kid”?

12

Well, to me it sounds like there are several things going on:

One is that we all forget that procrastinating and making excuses about why something isn’t getting done is in many cases more unpleasant than the task itself. Pretending to do one’s homework when there is nothing else to do is even more tedious than doing the homework. It seems like you’ve taken away any distractions. You can explain this, but it most likely won’t work. Once she gets into a routine of actually doing her work it will probably be more enjoyable for her. In the meantime, you’ve got a battle of wills going on. You’re going to have to use your own judgment on how far you are going to fight her and what that will mean for your short-term relationship.

Now that all this work is overdue she is probably overwhelmed as well. You may decide to let her get a low grade in a subject (or two) in order to complete other past due work. Tackle one subject’s work and then move on to another. I’d also advise you not to tell teachers who’s subjects you are not doing the make up work in this plan.

As far as study skills go, schools often stink at teaching these if they do at all. You can enroll her in an extra class after the school year or try and help her yourself. I think that part of the reason schools fail at teaching this is that it really requires that individual attention be paid to each student. Your daughter may learn best by listening because those types tend to do better in the earlier grades when the teacher tells them all the material that they will be tested on. Later on those kids have to read more and can fall behind because they don’t retain information as well that way. Books on tape and using a tape recorder tend to work best with those kids. Try and figure out the best way for your daughter to study as my WAG may not be the solution.

Good luck

13

Gad. I’m a seventh grade teacher- multiply the OP’s comments by 50 and you have my life. Only with me, it’s “I KNOW I turned it in! You must have lost it/thrown it away because you don’t like me/fed it to the wandering crack addicts!” And never, ever an apology when we find the assignment stuffed in the back of the locker, or in a pile of papers without names on them, or nowhere because she didn’t do it.

14

My 16 year old has been pulling the same crap for his whole time in high school. He’s a junior now and has finally seen the light now that it’s too late. I suggest a trip to the guidance counselor for you and your daughter. The counselor can give you the facts on what she needs on her transcript to get into which college. Once my son saw that he was in danger of not getting into anywhere he shaped up pretty quickly. Flunking homework from not turning it in is the worst…no excuse for that. It makes me crazy with frustration.

For years we’ve been restricting after school activities until his grades improve, then he gets them back, then he gets bad grades, then he looses privileges, blah blah blah. It never really worked. Finally we just said “Fine, these are your grades, it’s your work, your reputation and career options at stake, do what you want.” Things started improving pretty soon after that. One thing I’ve learned about teens is that you can’t really make them do anything. You can make her stare at books all day or not go out with her friends but you can’t make her study or get good grades.

One problem we did have to solve is that kids who are pretty smart and have never been challenged in grade school or middle school sometimes don’t know how to study efficiently. My son didn’t really understand what it meant to study or work hard in a class because he never had to until high school. I would take an average hard working student any day over a smart student.

15

Ah. Yeah. I nearly flunked high school because of pulling this crap and I have absolutely no idea why I did it. Nope. No rational explanation. Just… hit 8th grade, stopped turning things in. Had an almost pathological fear of trying to get the work done. Wasn’t until 11th grade that a friend took me in hand (who happened to be in most of my classes, and who, thankfully for my future career, I was desperately and unrequitedly in love with) and made me show him all my homework before it was due that I got back on track.

I scratch my head trying to figure out what changed. I can’t, really. The work got a little more demanding, but if I’d put in any effort I could have done it. Those were four miserable years of lying and hating myself for not doing it and being too scared to get back on the horse, so to speak.

I wish you luck either getting to the bottom of this and/or just getting together a routine where she’s back to doing her homework. Knowing that someone knew exactly what I had due helped scare me straight. Maybe there’s a possibility you could enlist a friend of hers to help with the peer pressure? I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. It’s just what worked for me.

16

Well, you could say “Do your algebra homework” but she simply doesn’t want to do her algebra homework. That’s not going to change, algebra homework is not fun- it will never be fun. She doesn’t even want to talk about her algebra homework so every time you bring it up she’ll be completely unreceptive.

So, talk on subjects that she will be receptive to. I’d say gently encourage her to start thinking about long-term goals she wants to set for herself. Chances are she’ll be far more enthusiastic about these things.

If she’s as smart as you say she is, she’ll probably set pretty high goals. Soon she’ll realize on her own that her current grades will be an impediment to reaching her goals. Then, improving her grades will be something that she’ll be doing for herself not something she’s supposed to do.

Maybe she doesn’t have a clear vision of what she wants for herself. Being 15 can be very confusing. Start asking her about what she wants to do for college, what careers interest her, what cities she’d like to live in. As she starts to envision all that she is capable of, she’ll start to realize how easy it is to screw it up. Improving her grades will have more urgency for her.

Let her come to these conclusions. When she tells you she thinks she’d like to go to Wattsamatta U., don’t say, “Well, you won’t get into Wattsamatta U. unless you improve your grades.” Say, instead, “Wattsamatta U.? That’s a very good school, tough to get into but you’re more than smart enough. You can get in if you really want to.”

Of course, you have to have the not fun conversations too. And you do have to teach discipline. Sometimes you just gotta lay down the law. But try this other stuff too.

I’m not a parent, but I was an underacheiving teenager not too long ago.

The difficult thing is that just when you are on the verge of adulthood, and adulthood is what you want most in the world, you deceive yourself that it’s so far out of your reach.

Somehow, it seems 7, 8, and 9 year olds have much more solid ideas of what they want when they grow up than teenagers do. It’s almost like by the time we reach our teen years we have grown so weary of waiting to become grown-ups that we just convince ourselves that it is so far off.

There’s gotta be a moment when you realize “Holy crap! My whole entire life is waiting for me just around the corner! I’ve going to have to do stuff to make it work!” Help her get to this point.

This all sounds good as I write it out, but when I actually have kids of my own I’ll probably just beat them.

17

Doesn’t sound to me like she’s rebelling. She sounds like a normal 15-year old who’s lost her mind, that’s all.

I mean that in a good way. Mrs. Genghis was telling me about some research she just read about - it turns out that teenagers’ minds really *are * wired differently than ours, and when they tell you they don’t know why they do the things they do, it’s actually true. They really don’t know.

This bears out my experiences from my misplaced (literally) youth, and from my own two teens. The 16 year old suddenly “got it” just in time for High School, and we’ve never had to push him; his 13-year old sister is drifting through life, oblivious to her assignments, commitments, you name it, it’s a surprise to her. We’re hoping for a Freshman-year miracle for her, too; until then, we review everything every night with her, and we talk to her teachers a lot - and she knows it. It’s forcing her to pay a little more attention.

The good news? They grow out of it, eventually. The bad news? You don’t know when they’ll do so. Your best strategy is to show her the delicacy of her situation - colleges are paying attention to the grades she’s getting right now, she’s smart enough to go where she wants, it would be a shame to blow it by thoughtless dithering, etc. ect. blah blah blah. Maybe the scare will cause her to take your strategies seriously with enough time to turn it around.

18

I did this, and damned if I know why. I always managed to pull my ass out of the fire by testing well, but for some reason I just didn’t do homework. Or when I did, somehow it wouldn’t get turned in or something. My brother did the same thing, and damned if I know why he did it either.

The only cure was time.

19

I’ll buy her. A lot of people think a 15 year old can’t pull a plow, but patient people know better.

I used to be that way too. I just got tired of the repetition in the lesson plans. I learned everything on the first day of the lesson and spend the rest of class reading a book under my desk. Never did any homework but passed any test that they gave me. I could make any teacher pull their hair out in frustration.

I just grew out of it. Maturity can be a wonderful thing.

The laundry thing is a peeve of mine. My daughter does the same thing sometimes. :mad: Nothing quite like getting to the washateria and finding folded clothes under a pile of dirty.

20

I started doing what your daughter did my junior year of highschool. I was getting good marks on my tests and quizzes without doing the homework so I said fuck homework I don’t need to do it. I honestly did not do a single homework assignment at home my last two years of high school. The homework I did do was done during German and English classes which kept my marks at the b- level. Our school did weighted grading but your grade wasn’t weighted if you got below a b- in an honors class. My goal was nothing below a b- in an honors class and thats what I did. I guess my point is that if she is still doing well on tests and quizzes and is learning the material without doing the homework she might be questioning why she should do the homework. If that is the case then your only legitimate course of argument is that colleges care what her grades are.