Your Tween is pretty busy with all of the things they do. There are times when a busy schedule gets overwhelming. As a result, you and your Tween become stressed out. This often results in less than desirable behavior from your Tween. While you should address the issue of the behavior, it is also important to figure out if your Tween is over-scheduled and having trouble with managing their time with all of their activities.
One thing you can do with your Tween is to sit down and map out a schedule of all of their current activities for the week. This will give you an indication if your Tween is doing too much and is overstressed as a result of it. At this point, you may want to look at the activities and the time involved and ensure that they do have some free time where they can relieve their stress with whatever method they need to. While you probably don’t want them playing video games all the time as a relaxation method, you can make sure they have some time to themselves.
If your Tween is more of a social person, then make sure they do have some time that they can spend with their friends. While you still have to provide some supervision at this age, you and your Tween can come to a compromise on where and how long they can spend with their friends. This activity can be left for the weekend where there is more time available.
School projects can add an additional stress to schedules for both your Tween and you. The trick to tackling these projects and getting them in on time is to help your Tween set up a schedule in which certain aspects of the project are completed by certain times. Creating a schedule is often only half of the battle. Since they are still learning time management skills, you really need to be on top of them to get this done.
While some things you can leave for them to manage on their own, this might be a little too much for their skills at this time, especially if this is the first time they have done it. Later on, you can step back and let them have a little more control over when school projects are done and how they get done.
It is important to recognize that Tweens can’t always manage their time effectively. This often translates to behavior that you would rather not see. So, if the source of your Tween’s stress is not having enough time to do what needs to be done, a reevaluation of their schedule is in order. It may be time to cut out a few activities so that they can have some time to themselves to get away from the stress.