High school is often an exceptionally busy time for students. They are forging lasting friendships, creating memories, and charting a course to pursue their dreams. There’s a significant amount of pressure on students to fill their schedule with activities, athletics, and volunteer opportunities. However, teens only have so much time in the day (just like adults). This can make balancing academics and extracurriculars for teens (and parents) challenging.
As a parent, you have the benefit of experience, and there are some things you can do to help your teenager balance a full schedule. You can help them prioritize activities, develop strategies to help them with time management, and support their academic achievements. This kind of support can help teens manage their time as effectively as possible.
Every teen is going to be different. You can develop solutions that work specifically for you, your teen, and your teen’s goals. It can be challenging to find the right balance for your teen’s academic and extracurricular schedule–but doing so can make for a happier, healthier teen in the long run.
Avoid Over Scheduling
There are only so many hours in the day. One of the most powerful ways to help your teen balance their academic and extracurricular responsibilities is to ensure they aren’t overloading their schedule in the first place.
This kind of over-scheduling can occur for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes your teen is eager to take everything on (and doesn’t have a good sense of how much they’re committing to). In other cases, your teen may sense pressure from parents, colleges, or peers to join activities as a means to fit in or improve college entrance chances.
Unfortunately, over scheduling can lead to significant and lost-lasting burnout. Teens only have so much energy on a given day (and they need a surprising amount of sleep every night). As with adults, burnout can lead to less energy, higher stress, and poorer performance. Your teen might even stop enjoying some of the activities that they used to look forward to. And because burnout can take months or years to recover from, your teen’s ability to balance both their academics and extracurriculars could be significantly (and negatively) impacted.
How to Deal with a Busy Schedule
Effective time management can help your teen better balance their academic, extracurricular, and personal needs. Good time management can also help lower the stress level for your teen! Here are some tips you can use to help your teen better manage a busy schedule:
Emphasize structure: A highly-structured schedule will help your teen know what’s coming next and what they should prioritize in the future. But be careful–when that structure is too inflexible, your teen may start to feel stifled. Create the structure, but keep it flexible to meet your teen’s day-to-day needs. (Regular check-ins can help in this regard.)
Categorize your teen’s to-do list: Categories can help your teen easily and quickly see what’s important and what can be deprioritized. Rather than dealing with a million to-dos, your teen can simply focus on the category that currently takes priority. This can break long term goals into more manageable chunks.
Prioritize tasks: To teens and adults alike, having to deal with many tasks at once can become overwhelming very quickly. It’s important to know which tasks must be handled first and which can wait, as well as which ones are important and which ones are less important. Prioritizing can help you know when things are urgent and when you can take breaks!
Be there to help, but don’t nag: As a parent of a busy teen, you may want to check in constantly to make sure your teen isn’t falling behind on academic or extracurricular tasks. But constant check-ins can undermine your teen’s confidence. Instead, create regularly scheduled check-ins. This can help you accomplish the same thing without unintentionally undermining your teen.
Be a good role model: If you don’t currently employ any time management strategies for yourself, your teen may think they don’t need them either. As with eating vegetables or exercising, it’s important to model the behavior you want your teens to adopt. As such, modeling good time management skills and effective strategies can help your teen develop their own!
How to Balance Academics and Extracurriculars for Teens
It’s easy for the academic side of things to fall by the wayside when your teen gets busy. But make sure that your teen has the resources they need for academic success. This could mean scheduling extra time with teachers or visiting the school resource center.
You can also find effective off-campus options for academic success, such as tutors or other programs. Either way, make sure your teen is leaving enough time for study and for prep so that they are empowered to succeed academically.
That said, it’s important to remember that while academic success can certainly open doors–there’s more to your teen than their grades or extracurricular activities. Not every path is for every student. Find what works for your student and their goals.
If you want to talk about your teen’s health, contact Children’s Healthcare Associates today to schedule an appointment at our Chicago or Northbrook offices.