PRIORITY CHECK
Helping Children Get Organized

Your child sits on the bed in a room that looks like it exploded—open backpack spilling books on the floor, unfinished homework littering the desk, cold pizza peeking from under the mountain of discarded wardrobe choices. Standing in the doorway you wonder when your child will get organized—not to mention when the room will get cleaned.

Getting organized is nothing more than learning to prioritize, which is essentially naming your goals and putting them in order. Putting goals in order is a process of backtracking, like learning to put your socks on before your shoes. The difficulty is not, in fact, the priorities, but the goals toward which they take you. If you know where you’re going, it is a lot easier to get there.

Let’s say your teen has four goals; to get a B in math, to get an after school job, to spend time with friends and to make the soccer team. Although these goals vary from kid to kid, each goal is of equal importance. Without good organization, eventually one gets in the way of another, and goals fall farther and farther out of reach. The key is to identify and set the priorities that get the four larger objectives accomplished.

Help your teen see each goal as the top of a mountain and recognize that there are steps to be taken to "reach the summit." To climb the mountain of getting a B in math, for instance, your teen will have to turn in every homework assignment on time and perform well on every test. To turn in homework on time and do well on tests, it’s necessary to study every night. To study every night, the student will have to take good notes and ask questions in class, if these mountains prove to be too big, scale them down and aim for smaller, more-achievable goals in the beginning.

This process of prioritizing puts the child in charge and takes you out of the role of bad guy. When we set our own priorities, we tend to stick to them. When we have them set for us, we tend to ignore them. Working together to realize these goals puts you both on the same side.