Navigating the school year can feel like steering a captainless sailboat through unpredictable waters. For parents of teens with ADHD and executive function challenges, it often seems like the sails are flapping wildly with no clear direction. You’re at the helm, trying to keep things on course while waves of procrastination, disorganization, and impulsivity threaten to tip the boat. But Focus First Academic Coaches can help direct your child’s sails—let’s chart a course through these rough seas with some creative remedies to help everyone find smoother sailing.
Morning Chaos
Your teen’s mornings can resemble a scene from a chaotic regatta—alarms blaring, items misplaced, and a general sense of disarray. It’s as if the boat’s crew is scrambling to hoist the sails and still manage to forget their maps. To help regain control, set up a visual morning schedule. Color-coded checklists and a designated spot for essentials can act like a steady rudder, guiding them towards a more organized start. Put one for hygiene on the bathroom mirror and one for sports, band, lunch, and essentials by the door as they head out. Have them pack their own lunch and get their backpacks organized and out the door before bedtime. Lastly, set boundaries about them only getting on the phone on the ride to school after all the steps have been finished at home.
Difficulty with Time Management
Estimating how long tasks will take can feel like trying to predict a storm at sea. Equip your teen with a 60-minute visual timer to help their concentration and productivity; to visually mark the passage of time helps kids with EF since they usually have no strong sense of time. Let our coaches help break tasks into smaller chunks and practice time estimation together to help them navigate through the day with more confidence and less last-minute panic.
Procrastination on Homework
Procrastination can be like an unexpected current pulling the sailboat off course. Your teen might prefer sailing in the direction of video games or social media, leaving homework to drift in the wake. Establish a distraction-free study zone and set up a reward system with the video games or phones to incentivize staying on course. Regular homework routines with built-in breaks can help prevent the ship from veering off into turbulent waters of failure.
Trouble with Organization
Disorganization in your teen’s room and backpack can feel like a sailboat with tangled rigging—everything’s in a mess and nothing seems to work right. At Focus First we help implement an organizational system with labeled folders and bins, and use our coaches to help your son or daughter learn how to use planners or digital tools to keep track of assignments. Our coaches will help you regularly review their space together to ensure it stays shipshape.
Struggles with Prioritization
Balancing schoolwork, chores, and extracurricular activities can be like trying to manage a ship’s crew with a sleepy captain. Using our resources, we will help your teen create a prioritized to-do list, using a matrix to categorize tasks by urgency and importance. Encourage them to tackle high-priority tasks first and break down larger projects into manageable steps, so the sails are set in the right direction.
Difficulty Following Instructions
Following multi-step instructions can be as tricky as reading a nautical chart in a storm. To make things clearer, we provide written instructions and visual aids alongside verbal directions. We color code the verbs in a prompt, and we help break tasks into smaller steps, so we can review each one together, ensuring they understand the course before setting sail. We teach voice to text, typing skills to help tackle dysgraphia as well. Try out our resources!
Challenges with Impulse Control
Impulsive behavior can feel like sudden gusts of wind throwing the boat off course. Practice mindfulness and self-regulation techniques to help your teen steer a more controlled course. We have lessons with role-playing scenarios, breathing and mindfulness techniques from great resources that will help to improve impulse control and decision-making; our coaches provide ways for you to reinforce positive behavior while setting consistent consequences for impulsive actions.
Difficulty with Transitions
Start with “habit stacking” which is a technique that involves linking new habits with existing ones to make the new behavior easier to adopt. Want to find out more–contact us and set up an appointment through our calendy on our homepage.
As you implement these creative remedies, you’ll notice your once captainless sailboat gradually finding its way. With a steady hand on the wheel and a few navigational aids, the journey will become much smoother. Consider our coaching to help your child hoist those sails, trim the rigging, and set a course for smoother sailing. The back-to-school season might still have its waves, but with these strategies, they’ll be navigating through them like a seasoned captain.