How much supervision of home schooling should a 14 year old need?

[grandehorizontale]

I have a 14 year old. My difficult ex says that because I am still out at work all day (partly because he is in arrears with maintenance - grr) my 14 year old should live with his father during the week,.

I think that my 14 year old should get on with his work on his own, without one of us standing over him. There are some direct less of course.

Any views? GH

My 11 year old gets on with his work on his own. He occasionally asks me if he doesn't understand something but mostly works alone in the same room as me.

14yo can vote with his feet

My 12 year old has to get on with it which I hate but we’re both working. I do ask about work and try to talk about what she’s learning. It’s like getting blood out of a stone !!

It depends on the 14 year old and also on the school. Mine needs supervision with school work and homework when he’s at school. No one would tell me if he wasn’t there or was doing badly. The school is pretty crap.

Online lessons are not live, badly planned and very confusing so he needs help at homeschool too.

Mine does it without supervision.

For my 14 year old it depends on how the work is presented. Last time he definitely needed support to try to navigate through the work and provide some help as there seemed little from the teachers. This time with a full timetable and some live classes, he'd probably be fine on his own.

Oh, well if your son doesnt want to and you don't think it would benefit him, that's the end of that.

My daughter (14) is a nightmare and does not do it at all properly. But I can't supervise her, because I'm teaching my classes.

So now, I let her do as much as she can, but every evening when I've finished my work, I check her's and if there's anything she does not understand, then I go over it with her then and she catches up at night.

I've found that motivates her to get as much done during the day as possible, but it does mean that I am knackered!

[quote lljkk]@SOLINVICTUS, do you expect parents to be doing more than getting their children there on the call?

I know you're talking 14yr olds, but I ask because I don't know what to do about my 16yr old.

I am ready to give up on my 16yr old's A-levels. I could do the daily sitting with him for an hour+ when he was 6 or 7yo to get 10 minutes of homework done. But I can't sit & nag for 3-4 hours on work days especially when DS doesn't finish the work. I know the college is going to complain to us parents about his missed homework; I think I will have to ask the college whether DS can continue or do they want him to quit. I can't make DS want to do things that confuse him. So it feels like they'd rather see back of him.

We could remove his wifi access to all websites except Google Classroom. We could remove data from DS's phone package so he can't do anything but local games and Google classroom on it. But fundamentally, he's not doing the work because he finds it boring & confusing. He'll just play with Lego or the cat instead. He doesn't have the skills to study hard at something that confuses him and confusing makes it boring. He's bored by biology & confused by the math. He could get help or maybe even inspired fairly easily if he could go in person to college but he can't go there in person.

I can't make him want to try hugely harder at things that are confusing & boring. It's not sustainable for me to whipcrack for next 1.5 years either.

I probably need to ask around what other people have done when their kids dropped out of A-levels to help them make other job & skills progress. I'm not sure what I should be asking, especially I assume things like apprenticeships are very difficult now & the college hasn't 100% confirmed they just want to kick him out. DS is nice, hard working & clever. But the current education A-level pathway is a fail for him. I'm just trying to puzzle what else can happen, and how.[/quote]
I would look into repeating y12 in September

If he's set on science for further qualifications then he might want to consider BTECs instead. (Level 3 BTEC is the same as a-level in difficulty so counts towards applying to uni etc )

I agree with you that cracking the whip now is pretty pointless considering that he may go to uni and pay lots of money for the privilege of being bored and confused.

How were his GCSE grades? What does he think about his A-level choices ? Does he want to go to uni?

Maths and Biology are tough subjects. (I have a y13 doing them)

When my son went into y12 he started bunking off from school and I had 2 years of threats of expulsion from his college. He studied BTECs which were better for him tbh. The coursework meant that he couldn't do nothing until the end- he had to write essays and stuff which kept him on track. He got distinctions but was bored and annoyed at the cajoling.

He started a part-time job in y12 and he's proved himself so well that he's been promoted to train on in-house schemes that usually have much older people on it. He has happily done some extra vocational qualifications through work which he's enjoyed unlike school which was about going through something that was expected of him. He's not gone to uni but is very motivated when it comes to work and has had courses and other training paid for.

I am not supervising my Year 7 at all and she seems absolutely fine. If she is unsure she chats with her friends or asks the teacher on the chat function/by email. I don’t check her work when she is in school either.

12 year old does his without supervision, I’ll ask him if he’s ok now and then but that’s it.

There's been a lot of talk about this with lockdown. But really they need to be studying independently at this age. They're approaching gcse age and will have long periods of revision time for exams and lots of coursework. If they can't study independently by this stage it should be a priority to instill this skill / discipline ASAP.

So I wouldn't expect much intervention needed. Maybe some support around work planning if they can't do this already.

Yesterday I would have said that my 14 yo needs no supervision. He had made it clear he preferred to be left to do it all by himself.

We've been going over what's expected each evening ahead of the next day.

I work out of the home most of the day. Today I popped home and he was gaming online with mates. He said he had finished his 2 hour maths task in an hour.

After a bit of poking from me he said he didn't really understand the prerecorded lesson, and had tried the after lesson task but got confused, got most of the questions wrong, and so left it and started gaming.

I told him to give it a go and not to game until he'd either got everything correct, or the lesson ended. He could tell I was annoyed.

Funnily enough 25 minutes later he had got it all right.

I thought I could trust him so it's been an eye opener and I'm going to have to modify my approach.

I do think that ideally it's nice if kids can have some contact during the day rather than being totally alone. Plus someone to take an interest in their work. I totally appreciate that's not always possible, and in OP's case if that means living with his dad there will be lots to consider.

We (me, DH, 2xDC) are all at home doing our own thing in separate rooms. DD(14) is pretty self sufficient, although she did text me today to come and fetch her book from across the room because the cat was on her lap

I think she might struggle if she was on her own in the house though.

Ds is 14 and in Y9, so only just 14.

He can work independently but I sometimes have to check the work he’s handing in on Teams as it’s rushed and not up to his usual standard! I suppose I should just back off but if I feel he could and should produce better work then I’ll tell him.

I’m lucky that I’m at home currently otherwise I think he’s get pretty lonely day in day out alone!

Mine has to be watched constantly. He is worse than my 7 year old. It's mentally far more draining and I am tired already.