Parenting Tips for Organizing Teenager's Schedules

My favorite idea for managing a teenager's schedule is to have a big calendar up in the kitchen where you can write down everything your teen needs to do. This approach provides a nice, visual handle on what is going on at all times. If your teenager is extra busy, you may consider using a planner that outlines the hours in a day in half-hour increments. The one I like to use has a lot of room to write things down since it gives you two pages to a day and has places for a to-do list, the aforementioned schedule by half hours, a list of phone calls to be made, and more. I find that this keeps things simple for me.

Another idea for keeping your teenager's schedule organized is to keep your teenager at least a bit less than hectically busy. There are few things worse for a teen than having their parents expecting them to do everything and do it perfectly. Also, everyone needs some time to relax. So be sure your teenager has some time to recuperate before rushing on to the next activity.

You can also keep your teen's schedule under control with a large dry-erase board. With this approach you can write out the week's schedule and erase it as soon as you need to do so. For those of us who learn better visually, use a digital recorder to record the order of your child's schedule so you can get a mental idea of what is going on each day.

A lot of parents choose to make their teenagers choose only one activity per category, so, for example, they can choose one sport and one instrument to officially do at a time. This means that they can do other things in their spare time if they choose to do so, but that these things will be done without anyone grading or judging them while they do it. This takes a lot of the pressure of performance off of your teenager—not to mention how much pressure it can take off of you.