Question
My almost 15yr old daughter, 9th grader, has been homeschooled since preschool. For the past 2 years we have seen a steady decline in her ability to focus and complete her work. She has no learning issues, and I thought she might be bored so we enrolled her this past year in 4 online classes where I was not the primary teacher. We also unexpectedly moved 3 times during the school year as my husband transitioned out of the military. As a result of the moving I found myself slowly taking over her classes from checking her online assignments, making her a daily schedule, standing over her, and sometimes even doing part of the assignments to "get it done". We felt the move was hard and in trying to help, we made things much worse. When we finally settled in March, we stopped "helping". She didn't do a thing to pick up the slack, and doesn't care that she's weeks late in assignments. She surfs the net instead of doing research or homework. We give her an hour to do something that could be done in 30min and find she's been messing around on the internet the entire time. We are letting the chips fall even though these grades will be on her transcript. How do we motivate a teen? This laziness started before the move, but it has gotten worse. Her interests are surfing the net and video games, so I assume we take those away, but we tried that before and it didn't help. She has no interest in attending regular school so I know that's not an issue. She is bright and capable of A's with effort so I'm frustrated, and she could care less. My husband says we should go back to textbooks with no online classes since she can't stop surfing the net during school time. Textbooks may help, but she just won't work anymore. What do you think we should do? We are prepared to do whatever it takes to get her back on track.
