Help Your Teens Be Better Organizers

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As your kids move up in their secondary school years, they face increased demands academically and socially. In addition, there are further demands of sports, clubs, family responsibilities, and friends. Instead of their stressing out and scrambling to catch up, you can guide them to get ahead of these demands on their time. When you help them build their organizational skills, they develop independence and success in managing their time and lives both in and out of school.

It is not unusual for all teens to be challenged by increased demands on their time, but for those teens who have not built strong organizational skills, keeping up threatens an even tougher road.

Your teen does not want to get behind or do poorly in school assignments any more than you want to be a nagging parent. It is important for them to know that their inadequate organizational skills don’t reflect low intelligence, laziness, or defiance and that you have confidence in their abilities to change and achieve their goals…and reboot family harmony.

With your help, your teens can build the stronger organizational skills they need for the increasing demands on their time. The resulting strengthening in their self-management of schoolwork and life beyond school boosts success and lowers stress.

Source: Judy Willis, MD, MEd

Help your teens build the skills they need now more than ever.

Organization is one of the executive function networks still developing in the brains during the teen years. At this time, when they face increased demands for these executive functions, your help can be critical to help them navigate these challenges.

Start by discussing goals they want to achieve, rather than focusing on negatives, past failures, or what you want them to achieve. Encourage them to think about the benefits forthcoming from their boosted organizational and time-management skills.

They might

• Maintain successful and timely completion of work and achieve better results;
• Enjoy improved organization of their “stuff” such as backpacks, notebooks, binders, computer, and desk files;
• Eliminate scrambling;
• Increase free time;
• Reduce stress; and
• Create better relationships with teachers and you.

Once they are motivated by goals they want to achieve through better organization, build their confidence that these are within their power. Promote your teens’ awareness that they can organize successfully, especially if they’ve experienced criticism for organizational failures in the past.

Have your teens evaluate systems of organization they know or use.

Remind them of things they might already have organized, such as music on their playlists, their social connections with friends, photos, sports practice schedules, etc. As they think about these actions, they’ll begin to see that they have used skills of organization successfully. This awareness motivates their interest and perseverance in working with you to further build and apply their desired organizational skills to better manage schoolwork and life.

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Engage in discussions that can stimulate their own confidence and competence in organizing for themselves.

Consider together systems of organization that are part of their lives and experiences, such as the following:

• Textbooks: Have them select books (divided into chapters) that they think demonstrate good sequence and organization.

• School year vacation schedules: Do the vacation breaks promote organization of family travel or activity time? Would it be better to organize the year with shorter summer vacations and more frequent weeklong breaks throughout the year?
• Sports they play: Are the games with any one opponent spread across the season? Does this give a team that’s not playing well at the beginning of the season the time needed for players to improve? Is there enough of a break, especially after long travel days, for players to be fully rested for final and playoff games?
• The organization within an orchestra: How does the staging of a play or musical production evolve? What steps does it take to organize a party, fundraiser, or social function?
• Classification systems of plants and animals: Most teens have been taught about these systems of organization. Perhaps these were not big areas of interest or success. Help them reexamine these organization systems as if they are the organizing biologist. Most biologists find the current classifications (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species), very effective in distinguishing a plant from an animal or an amphibian from a reptile. The characteristics of each grouping allow them to identify and organize current and future plants and animals. What logic do your teens see in these classifications that they could apply to help them organize their computer files/documents?

Use opportunities to build organization from the start.

Help teens build more habits and strategies for the organizational goals they have with systems such as these:

• Use color-coded folders, note cards, or computer files. These can help them organize what they need for each class and project.
• Practice making master folders for files. To get organized for a project, guide them to start by looking at the various types of information. When they distinguish the characteristics of each type of information, they can make folders labeled with category names they choose. Make sure to explain that these category names and the items in each folder are just preliminary. As the project or unit progresses, they can go through each category folder and remove files that don’t fit with the others and create revised ones.
• Keep a master list of all active files. Guide your teens to expand their short-term organizational skills with their computers. Once a month, they can remove items no longer needed from each folder and the master list.

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• Encourage the use of visual organizers. Your teens probably had some experience with visual organizers such as Venn diagrams, maps, or graphs. Show them how these tools they previously used in school can be helpful for their personal organization of time and material.
• Consider guides. Your teens can benefit from the guidance of people they respect, both in and out of school. Invite them to consider someone you or they know who is well organized. What does that person do to stay organized?
• Use calendars. They provide visual reminders of events, timelines, and notifications.

Reflect on what worked.

As they make progress, encourage your teens to think about how they improved their organization and were more successful at achieving their goals. Guide them to keep track of the strategies they used. These reflections will help with future challenges, sustain motivation, and exert greater effort as they become more independent and organized learners.

Invite them to consider these self-questions:

• What improvement did I first notice?
• What did I do that was the best use of my time?
• What did I try that I’d do again?
• What would I do differently next time?
• How and when could my strategies be useful in the future?

As you provide your teens with guidance and practice opportunities to build their organizational skills, take time to recognize and appreciate the impacts of your efforts. You might first note their greater success in things such as staying on top of assignments, class preparedness, or timely completion of long-term projects. Continue to take the time to acknowledge their evolving skills and independence in using them. Acknowledge and appreciate the reduction in strife, nagging, and frustrations. Give yourself a pat on the back for your efforts that promoted their successes.

You can read more about this in my book, Unlock Teen Brainpower.