3 Ways to Motivate Your ADHD Teen With Distance Learning

In the classroom setting, your teen is faced with teachers and his classmates. In a perfect scenario, if the teacher has a good command of the classroom, the students will be well behaved. In this scenario, even the student who struggles with motivation will follow his fellow classmates and pay attention to the best he can.

So what happens when parents find themselves quarantined with their son or daughter, who struggles with attention deficit and poor motivational issues? Well, if not managed properly, it can become incredibly stressful. Imagine if you leave your teen in his room from 8 a.m. through 2 p.m. while you are at work in your home office. After 2 p.m., you check in on him and you discover that he has accomplished nothing for the entire time. You and your teen aren’t going to be seeing eye to eye on much.

So if you are a parent in this situation, what do you do about it? In this post, I will introduce you to three strategies to help improve your teen’s level of motivation and productivity with his distance learning. The strategies are: creating a plan with your teen, creating incentives, and allowing your teen to fail.

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Creating a Plan

You will want to create a realistic plan that aides your teen to be as productive as possible. Keep in mind that he is accustomed to being in the presence of peers when learning, so your plan will have to make accommodations for this. It is also important to note that most schools, will already have lesson plans for distancing learning, that involves your teen needing to log in via video conference. Your plan will be dependent on how thorough the school’s plan is.

For example, if the school, has a plan that involves scheduled video conferencing where the teacher gives lessons and your teen interacts with his peers, then most of your planning has already been done for you. Regardless, you will create rules regarding access to social media, video games, and other distractions during school times. It is very important for you to implement agreed-upon consequences if the work is not done to completion.

Creating Incentives

Sometimes, negative consequences are not enough. Especially, when your teen already has a pattern of struggling with traditional schooling. You can find yourself quickly running out of negative consequences if his or her work is habitually left untouched or unfinished.

When creating a plan, it is important to get your teen involved in the process, so he or she can have a say, especially when it comes to being rewarded for completed work. It now becomes a balance system, where your teen is aware of the consequences he has agreed to, of not completing school work on time and also having something special to look forward to, upon successful completion of daily school work.

It is also important to note, that consequences and incentives have to be considered in the context of effort your teen has put into schoolwork, versus his or her cognitive aptitude.

Allowing Failure

Allowing failure is a sensitive topic for most parents, considering that no one wants to see their child fail. However, when dealing with a teen who is habitually resistant towards doing his or her work, allowing failure can be therapeutic.

Now, allowing failure does not mean an absence of an intervention when the kid is struggling. But it does mean, getting out of the teen's way, to see what happens after a plan has been put into place.

For example, checking in on your teen every 15 minutes to an hour, to ensure he or she is doing work, is somethings parents do to prevent failure. If the teen is already struggling at school, this frequent check-in often backfires, and leads to other issues and conflicts, which distract from the teen’s struggles at school.

Checking in at the end of the day is sufficient enough. So if at the end of the day your teen has not been successful in completing all of his work or some of it, it creates an opportunity for a discussion. This is where you and your teen can process what the real issues are and how to go about successfully addressing these issues. So some adjustments can be made to the original plan, which can be measured the following day.