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| Mon, 01-15-2007 - 1:41pm |
OK there is this mom at my work and she thinks that it is ok to let her 13 year old son to fail in 7th grade becuase he is supposed to manage his own homework and figure out his homework himself unless he askes for help. Is this ok?? I think that it is very wrong of her and that she should be making sure he gets it done and if he doesn't he gets consiquences. She came to me and asked me because he ex thinks that she should be making sure he does his homework. I asked her if she wants he son to fail because if he does he is going to think he is a failure. I only have a 9 month old but I think that I have pretty good grasp unless I am totally going in the wrong direction with the whole homework thing. help!!!

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I think it's OK to let kids "sink or swim", but only to a point. By this time in the school year, if he's not doing his homework, etc. he should have seen the results. He's already failed, why take it any further!
Now it's time to get with the teachers, the dad (I'm picking up perhaps that this is a divorce situation), and the kid and come up with a plan. The child needs to be part of the solution. He needs to have limits on "screen time" (TV, computer, and video games)and other activities until the grades are restored.
I do agree w/ your point about parents micromanaging their kids' lives. If my DD had a problem w/ work, I would expect her to deal w/ it herself. I would never embarrass her by calling her boss for her. At the beginning of the school year, she was very upset because she had a lot of school work, plus the p.t. job, applying to college, etc. and was over-stressed about everything. I think the last straw was that her boss scheduled her to work from 3:00-10:00 on a school night. Now you might think that an adult could figure out that would leave her no time to do homework, or that starting your homework after 10:00 p.m. isn't that good an idea, but she obviously didn't think of that, so I told my DD that it was up to her to tell her boss that during the week, she could either work 3-7 or 7-10 or something like that, but not the whole night. I assume she did, cause she never had that schedule again. Again, if she had a minor problem w/ her teacher, I wouldn't intervene. She had a really strict English teacher last year, (voted "strictest teacher in the school") who never gave her a good mark on one paper, thereby leading her to become very discouraged. This is a girl who always got an A in English and suddenly she was getting C's on the papers. I personally thought the grading was ridiculous. It was more difficult than anything I had in college, like 4 pages of instructions just in grammar, punctuation and style. I just read over the papers to see if I could spot any errors in grammar, but it's not like I could do the research & write the paper. I didn't say anything to the teacher, because I figure sometime in college, she will probably have a prof. who is a jerk and she will just have to deal with it.
Going back to the first question, I guess it depends on the child. My DD has always been very self-directed. I never have to ask her if she has homework. My DS is only 11 (5th grade). He's smart, but if he had a long-term project, he would tend to wait until the last minute unless I kind of nagged him to get started. It's not like I did the work, though. He will ask me if he doesn't understand something on the HW, but that's pretty rare. Otherwise, I don't check it anymore since he's getting good grades. I figure he's understanding everything.
With my DSD (11th grade), though, things haven't been so good. First of all, she was skipping school, so she got some attendance failures. She didn't even seem to care about the consequences of that, although she's not skipping school anymore. However, she's "sick" a lot, when I don't think she's really sick. I think she counts how many times she has been absent in a term, though. She also started out failing Science this year, which had never been a problem before. Her problem subject was Math. Her dad learned that when she was out, she wasn't making up the work. He said that he had to have a note from the teacher every week stating if she missed any work and how she was doing. Otherwise, we would have to wait for the progress report, which is about 1/2 way during the term. By then, it might be too late for her to make up things or she might be too far behind. By now, she should be old enough to be more responsible, but it's seems like she is immature for her age. Her dad doesn't want to "just let her fail" because he (we) want her to grad. from high school on time and then go to college, get a job and eventually leave home! lol Some kids just need more prodding than others, but I think 13 is way too young to just be left alone.
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