Between school, ECs, and application essays DS is experiencing major burnout. He emailed a teacher last night to let her know that it was going to be impossible to finish his homework due today. I made him stay home today since he said he almost fell asleep while taking a shower. He is mentally and physically exhausted. Is this a common theme in senior year?
How do parents deal with this and should a parent communicate with a teacher if your child is feeling overwhelmed? He does not want me to email his teachers. I just hope his teacher(s) don’t think negatively of him for skipping school.
No. Never did, won’t with the last. 90% of life is just showing up. If he needs more sleep then have him go to bed earlier.
Yes, I let my kids stay home very occasionally.
Guilty admission - one year, we traveled to Mexico for spring break with our kids. Our oldest was a HS junior at the time. I’ll never forget when he brought his AP Biology book to study on a diving/snorkeling boat trip!! We also paid a local student to speak Spanish with him so he could improve his conversational skills. At the end of the trip, he was dreading going back to school, because he hadn’t finished all of his homework.
When we got to the airport, they were asking for volunteers to be bumped. They said they would put the people up in a hotel overnight, and then they could fly first class the next day. DS looked at me with pleading eyes, so I took the offer for him and me. We went straight to the hotel, where he proceeded to work hard to finish everything. He felt much better. I don’t regret doing that for him.
"He is mentally and physically exhausted. Is this a common theme in senior year?
How do parents deal with this and should a parent communicate with a teacher if your child is feeling overwhelmed? "
Yes, a common theme. No, the child should be the one communicating. As a senior, the student is less than a year away from college. Time to learn to communicate with teachers and administration on one’s own.
A good 95% of my kids’ college apps were done during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. They were busy between school, sports, extracurriculars so that was there time to work on apps. Senior year is a squeeze. Did he use his break to get some of this work done?
Yes.
And I like them for me too.
Yes. He spent breaks working on his essays. He is a slow writer, and it take him a while to get going.
It is hard to strike the balance between having the kids understand that they need to show up and meet their responsibilities and feeling that they were just too run into the ground to function. Looking back, I would say that I let both kids take a couple of days off (over their entire year school career at home) when they were probably more exhausted than ill.
There is a really fine balance here and you have to know your individual kid. My daughter had a friend whose mom regularly called her in sick so she could finish an assignment, study for a test etc. Anything that the mom thought might give this girl a leg up. Turns out this girl got in to my daughter’s dream school and my daughter did not. We had a great talk about it where we acknowledged the pain of seeing this strategy work but agreed that we weren’t the least bit sorry that we hadn’t followed that path. Also turns out that this kid had major, major challenges in colleges including a mental breakdown.
That being said, mental health is as important as physical health and both have to be carefully guarded and sometimes you just need a day off for healing.
Yes, absolutely. There’s nothing so crucial that missing a day or two will make a difference for a good student, and when they need a day or two off, they need it, period. I prioritize health over school attendance and haven’t had problems with it. Added bonus, it helps in making it okay to ask for help - including in college when they’re on their own. Caveat: talking about good, serious students.
Yes I did. I felt that was part of learning how to cope with adult life . . .knowing when to dig in and when to pull back for a bit.
Then again we homeschooled so it was easier. But both my sons still had many activities and commitments and times when stuff felt overwhelming.
I’m not even sure it’s really a day off since he wants to spend the afternoon catching up with all his schoolwork.
Yes, some days, my IB/athlete/musician kid was so exhausted, I would just let him sleep in. He would then either go to school late and rested, or stay home and work. This was a kid who usually was asleep by 11, did not have screens in the room etc.
In my independent school (back in the dark ages), we stayed home to catch up on the volume of work – we called them “cookie days” – though I’m not sure why.
I’ve never taken a mental health day and it never occured to my kids to take one either. We did once take a trip to Japan that covered spring break plus a week. (DH had a conference there.) Since kids were in elementary school and middle school - we figured they’d learn more from the trip. Teachers were great - the second grader kept a diary, the older one had only one assignment from his history teacher who asked him to look for Greek and Roman inspired buildings and take photos.
All that said, my kids did not seem to be particularly overextended in high school despite taking a full load of AP courses relative to other students. They did not seem to be given the extensive busy work I’ve seen other students here on CC subjected to. For example Calc teacher had them do as much HW as they felt they needed. HW did not count for the grade. The one exception was AP Bio which covered everything that might conceivably be on the test. Most kids got 5s and those who didn’t got 4s.
Ours is so Type B that we kid him that since every day is a mental health day for him, we arrange “mental anguish” days occasionally when he must buckle down and do apps.
In my family, health trumps absolutely everything. So yes, I was allowed to take mental health days. I never really had to justify it to my parents.
I can’t imagine not letting my (future) children take one.
My mom generally gave us one mental health day a month.
Sometimes I wish I could give my son a day off, but at his school a day off adds more stress than it alleviates. You have to stay late for the next several days to make up everything they did in every subject, even down to going out and running the mileage you missed in PE and going to the art room to paint for AP Studio Art.
Never.
The whole concept was unthinkable in our house. And if I had to do it over again, that wouldn’t change.
I believe that it’s a student’s responsibility to be in school unless the absence absolutely can’t be avoided. We even made every effort to schedule doctor and dentist appointments outside of school hours so that our kids wouldn’t miss any more classes than necessary.
@TrudiRexar, when my son missed school for cross country meets (where he would run 3.1 miles in under 17 minutes), he still had to make up miles in PE! It was absurd.
Sure, why not? I can’t see any downside. For whatever reason he is exhausted and a little behind on some assignments. Let him work it out as he thinks best and if that includes a day off I would not think twice about it. He sounds like a conscientious student up against juggling all his usual commitments with college apps. He probably deserves the day off!