As my teenagers become more independent and take on a greater responsibilities for completing schoolwork, how do I talk to them about the importance of doing well in high school without scaring them?
You need to set the expectation that your teens have to be more responsible but also making sure that they have those skills. A lot of times kids may not have developed those skills in middle school and then they get into high school and they have all these assignments and projects and they don't know how to manage that. That's your role as a parent; to figure out if they have the skills to manage their work. If they do not, you can't be there on them all the time, you can't be checking their assignments and you can't call their teacher every day to make sure they turned their work in. But, you can say that if they have missing assignments by the end of the week and I will be checking on that, then what you are doing on the weekend is staying at home and hanging out with us.
