A Word for Parents of Procrastination-Prone Children
It can be frustrating to try to help a young person who habitually procrastinates. They may resist your attempts to problem solve, because they “don’t want help” or because seemingly everything you suggest is wrong. And you know what? They might be right.
Habitual procrastination is often a primarily emotional issue. Thus, meeting your child on an emotional level may be where you can best enter in. They may already be feeling shame and embarrassment about their poor habits, and until they can see that you care about tending to their emotional world, they may not care much about your proposed solutions.
Keep in mind the difference between stress and anxiety:
Stress is a normal part of everyday life. When we face challenges, our bodies release stress hormones, perhaps causing our heart rate to increase. Stress is uncomfortable, but can actually be helpful, because it tends to propel us into action. When we’re stressed, we might simply need to hear, “You got this! Keep going!”
Anxiety is a different story, though it looks similar on the outside. Anxiety is rooted in fear, and has the potential to knock us off course rather than push us towards our goals. Unaddressed anxiety about even simple tasks can become so strong that we’ll do anything to numb or avoid it, even to our own detriment.
Of course, the two can both be present in one situation. For example, a student who has a hard time managing stress may come to fear or dread stress-inducing tasks, and thus will experience both the stress of the task, compounded by the anxiety about the stress. Children who procrastinate don’t necessarily do so because they don’t know better—perfectly intelligent kids procrastinate all the time. It’s possible your child simply needs to learn to recognize anxious feelings and respond to them, rather than avoiding them.
One Do and One Don’t
First, don’t unload your irritations about the issue when your child is already experiencing high stress. Rather than adding your secondhand stress to their list of things to worry about, an anxious child instead needs to borrow from your calm. This doesn’t mean solving the problem for them—just maintaining a supportive posture. Children’s brains, just like adults’, don’t think as logically when they’re stressed, and a productive conversation about procrastination is not likely in a moment like this.
Which brings me to the do: approach your child’s procrastination with kindness and curiosity. Instead of beginning with a list of shoulds (e.g. “you should have started this weeks ago!”), begin by trying to understand their experience. Find a good moment (likely not when your child is in crisis mode) to have a conversation with your child and demonstrate that you’re genuinely curious about their emotional world. Find your own version of this statement: “I wonder what makes it so hard for you to get started. Help me understand your fear. I bet we can figure this out together.” This lets your child know that you’re a resource they can go to for support, rather than a source of shame they need to avoid.
