Helping Tweens with Time Management

My daughter is learning how many different balls she can keep up in the air within a 24-hour day. She’s learning to make decisions and stick with them. And she’s finding out pretty dang quick how difficult it is to divide her wants from all her other wants.

She loves band and plays the clarinet. She also plays the piano (a non-negotiable with her mother). Another passion is softball. Her father loves baseball and they eagerly share the bond; she in the spring, he in the fall. She’s in Jr. High and for the first time chooses ‘elective’ extra classes. Math, English, Health… yeah yeah yeah all the boring stuff is covered. But she found out she really LOVES drama. And FACS turned out to be way more fun than she expected (FACS is short for Family and Consumer Studies – yes, we called it Home Ec 100 years ago).

More recently she was chosen along with 18 other students to pilot a Chinese language class for 7th graders. A 3-year program rumored to end with a trip to China for the participants!

How exciting… right?

Guess what? She’s finding out super fast that her Super Tween Strength runs out around 5PM and sleeping in on the weekends isn’t enough of a Super-Power Elixir. Instead she’s learning the hard way that cutting out some of the good things will be necessary in order to really enjoy the great things. As a parent, I’m finding it harder and harder to make the decisions for her. Instead I’m looking for better ways to help her help herself.

• What do you tell your kids when they need help making deciding between wants and time?
• How do you help determine wants from actual needs?
• When do mom’s needs trump the Tween’s?
• If the family has a conflicting event forcing the Tween to choose, what do you do?
• Have you ever had to write your kid out of school so he/she could attend an ‘outside’ event? Did you agree to it?

These are tough conflicts for a grown up. For an 11-or 12-year-old to decide between a slumber party and her church youth basketball game is like asking her to decide between pizza and ice cream. She’s really not capable. She sometimes believes she has the super power of being in two places at once!

At some point we have to step in and help our Tweens learn the art of the polite decline.

They’ll thank us if they can find the time!