How to tell your parents to leave you alone
Perhaps you have the type of parent or caregiver that’s a bit…intense. Maybe they hound you about grades or ask a million questions that you don’t feel like answering. If this is the case, and if you’d like a break at times, share this with them.
In March of 2024, an article was published in APNews called ‘Why you should stop texting your kids at school’. Click the link to see the whole article- it’s really convincing!
Your parents may not realize how difficult it can be to focus when you’re at school. They also got used to being in contact with you at all times during the pandemic. Some teachers are calling phones the ‘digital umbilical cord’. And it needs to be cut from 8-3.
At parent workshops in Virginia, the school counselor tells parents they are actually contributing to their kids anxiety by sending messages, tracking their whereabouts and checking grades daily, which doesn’t give space for kids to be independent at school.
Some teachers say they get emails from parents right after returning exams, before the class is over, because kids feel the need (or are told) to report grades immediately to parents. I’ve heard about this kid of interaction in my practice. Kids feel a lot of pressure to do well in school, and this type of behavior from parents leads kids to believe that they have to be perfect to matter to their parents, that they will ‘get in trouble’ if they didn’t do as well as they’d hoped.
Libby Milkovich, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician says that all this texting back and forth leads kids to not be able to practice “self calming or problem solving skills. It’s easy to text, but if I don’t have a phone, I’ll have to ask the teacher or figure it out on my own”.
"Often parents say ‘I want to be able to reach my child at any time’ which has nothing to do with the child’s outcome. It’s because of the parent’s anxiety”.
You can tell your parents that it makes it very difficult for you to focus in class when you get so many messages. Every time our focus is interrupted (and Common Sense Media finds that the average teen receives 237 notifications a day) it takes a lot of brain power and energy to get back on task. When the phone vibrates in your pocket, now your focus is on your pocket. And you’re wondering, how do I get it out to the table? How do I check it? Randy Frieman, high school chemistry teacher in upstate New York says, “You ask them a question and they haven’t heard a word you’ve said. Their brain is elsewhere”.
It would be best, truly, if you turned off your notifications and if you put your phone in a locked place during class. This would allow you to have the best academic outcomes and honestly would help you feel better. It’s no fun to be distracted, bouncing from topic to topic. It exhausts us, and my guess is, you’ve got a lot going on and are attempting to accomplish big things. Tell your parents to stop texting you so much and also- own your part and try to remove distractions when you’re in a learning environment.