Middle School Mom: How We Built a Homework System for My Overwhelmed Tween

I'm so excited this week to share a guest post from the desk of Jill Petersen. Jill is a co-founder (along with Mary Frances) of Girls Mentorship - an inspiring organization dedicated to empowering girls to become bold leaders, confident friends, and connected members of their communities. No matter the gender of teen or tween you're raising, this message is for you. I hope you enjoy!

I have a new title this year. Middle school mom.

And despite being the co-founder of a company that spends every single day helping kids build confidence, communication skills, personal responsibility, resilience, and leadership…I’m here to report that none of that has made me immune to being completely humbled by seventh grade. 

The last ten weeks have been hard. Not catastrophic hard. Not something-is-terribly-wrong hard. Just the kind of hard that slowly wears on a family because no one really knows what they’re doing yet.

My oldest started middle school this year, and somewhere between elementary school and seventh grade, my baby seemingly became a teenager overnight.

No warning. No transition period. No instruction manual.

And suddenly, I’m hearing: “I hate school.” “I’m never going to use this in real life.” “Why do I even have to learn this?” Approximately 1,000 times.

This is new territory for us.

My son has never been anti-school. He’s athletic. He’s social. He has a lot of friends. 

But over these first ten weeks, I’ve started to realize that some of his sudden “hatred” of school isn’t really about school at all.

It’s about feeling overwhelmed. It’s being disorganized and not knowing where to start. It’s genuinely believing he can keep six classes’ worth of assignments in his head. It’s having absolutely, and I mean absolutely, no sense of urgency about a missing assignment.

Meanwhile, I’m staring at the gradebook thinking: DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THREE ZEROS ARE DOING TO YOUR GRADE?! He does not. 

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I had a pretty uncomfortable realization: I was expecting him to know how to do things no one had ever actually taught him how to do.

Elementary school didn’t require him to manage email. He wasn’t regularly navigating on online grade portal.

He wasn’t bouncing between Google Classroom, teacher emails, gradebook comments, different programs for different subjects, folders, worksheets, assignments completed in class versus assignments that suddenly became homework because he didn’t finish them.

Middle school feels like college.

And as a 40-year-old woman with a fully developed frontal lobe, even I have opened all these platforms and thought, Where the hell am I supposed to look?

Yet I expected my 12-year-old to figure it out. And quickly. Because I could see the solution. Make a list. Check your email. Look at the gradebook. Write it down. Finish the assignment. TURN IT IN. How hard is this?!

Apparently, pretty hard when you’re doing all of it for the first time. And that has probably been my biggest parenting lesson of this season: I can’t expect it before I teach it.

I can’t expect organization before I teach him how to organize. I can’t expect follow-through before we build a system for following through. I can’t expect him to advocate for himself if I’m always the one doing the advocating. And I can’t expect him to manage something independently just because I think he’s old enough to manage it independently.

But maybe the hardest part? 

I can’t save him from every consequence while simultaneously expecting him to learn responsibility. Oof.

Motherhood in this season feels like constantly adjusting the leash. 

When do I step in? When do I back off? When do I remind him? When do I let him forget? When do I help him fix it?

And when do I let him walk into school with the missing assignment and experience what happens next? I wish there were a formula. And as we all know, there isn’t. 

What I keep telling him is this: Life isn’t going to get easier simply because something feels hard. 

Being a kid is hard. School is hard. Sports are hard. Friendships are hard. Eventually jobs are hard. Relationships are hard. Parenting is hard.

The way we dance with hard matters.

If every time something becomes difficult we decide, I hate this. I’m bad at this. I don’t need this. Get me out of here, we give the hard thing all of our power.

And no, buddy, you may never use seventh-grade math in your future career. But you’re going to use what seventh-grade math is requiring you to practice right now. 

Grit. Failure. Perseverance. Determination. Advocacy. Problem-solving. Grace. Learning how to stay when you really, really want to quit.

Those are the things that come with you.

But here’s the part I don’t particularly enjoy admitting. While I’ve been watching him learn how to do hard things, I’ve had to look pretty closely at how I do hard things, too. Because I am his mirror. And there have absolutely been moments when my own fear has disguised itself as parenting.

Well, now he needs to read every night. And we need to work on typing because he still pecks at the keyboard. And no iPad until everything is done. Thank GOD he doesn’t have a phone yet because THAT WOULD BE GONE TOO. 

I’ve spiraled. I’ve felt guilty. I’ve been embarrassed. I’ve looked at him and wondered:

• What did I miss?
• What didn’t I teach him?
• How did we get here?

And then I have to remind myself of the same thing I’m desperately trying to teach him: This is information. Not an indictment. We found a gap, and now we get to teach into it. And, frankly, I’ve had to apologize more than once over these last ten weeks.

Because here’s another humbling truth: I can offer patience and perspective to a room full of girls all day long. Then one of my own children tells me for the fourth time that he “forgot” an assignment existed and apparently every regulation tool I have ever taught leaves my body.

Motherhood. 🤪

So I keep coming back to me. If I’m asking him to do hard well, am I doing hard well? If I’m asking him to regulate before reacting, am I? If I’m asking him to take responsibility for his piece, am I taking responsibility for mine? If I want him to give himself grace while he learns, am I giving him any? Am I giving myself any?

Because maybe neither one of us is supposed to have this figured out yet.

He’s a beginner at middle school. And I’m a beginner at parenting a middle schooler. We’re both learning. 

One of the most helpful things we’ve done is incredibly simple: we built him a system. Not a punishment chart. Not another lecture.

A literal step-by-step system for what happens during school, what happens when he gets home, how he figures out what needs to be done, and (this is apparently a VERY important step) how to make sure the thing actually gets submitted when he finishes it. 

We printed it. He uses it every day. And right now, I walk through it with him. Again. And again. And again. Because my job isn't to manage his homework forever. My job is to teach him how to manage it until he doesn't need me anymore. And eventually, I’ll loosen the leash a little more. Then a little more. Until one day I have to let go and watch him fly. Or fail. Probably both.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

We teach. We practice. We remind. We model. And then eventually, we have to trust them with what we’ve taught. So if you’re in a season of hard with one of your kids right now, I see you.

And before you look at their struggle and wonder, What did I do wrong?  Maybe ask a different question: What haven't they learned how to do yet? Then start there. Because I’m learning that raising capable kids isn't about making sure they never struggle. It's about resisting the urge to do the struggling for them.

I hope this helps. 

Resources:

• Get your free copy of Jill's homework checklist (Quick note: Infintite Campus is the name of our school's online portal. Yours may be called Canvas, Aeries, Schoology, etc) 
• Episode 168: Raising Teen & Tween Girls with Girls Mentorship (pt 1)
• Episode 169: Raising Teen & Tween Girls with Girls Mentorship (pt 2)
• Learn more about Girls Mentorship programs at https://www.girlsmentorship.com
• Follow Jill & Mary on Instagram @girlsmentorship