Adolescent Procrastination

Carl Pickhardt's recent blog posting about adolescent procrastination and stress certainly underscores the long-term consequences of this "do-it-at-the-last-minute" habit. Parenting, development and time management all play a role in adolescent procrastination.

I want to add to Carl's remarks about adolescent procrastination, because parents often ask me why teenagers seem to procrasinate so much. Not surprisingly, given that I've been blogging about procrastination for a couple of years now, I've written about this before.

Below, I provide a one-sentence summary of a main idea along with a link to the previous blog post that provides the details about the research. I hope it adds to what Carl has begun in this discussion of adolescent procrastination.

• An adolescent's development is related to procrastination, particularly his or her identity development.
• Parenting that may best be characterized as high demands for control without a high degree of warmth, particularly in the father-daughter relationship, has been shown to be related to procrastination.
• Adolescents have a less differentiated notion of time-management that may reflect other developmental issues that relate to procrastination.

Overall, these studies and related research certainly indicate that the development of self-regulatory skills requires maturation and appropriate modeling. Most importantly, I believe that children and adolescents must "learn by doing." It's not really possible to develop self-regulatory skills when they're always being told what to do (part of the problem of the authoritarian parenting style). We must foster autonomy and let children take on responsibility, learning as they go through their mistakes as well.