5 Tips to Help Teens Establish Good Back to School Routines

We’re sharing 5 tips for helping tweens and teens establish back to school routines.

Summer is not over yet but the start of the school year is fast approaching. While we’re enjoying these last few days of summer, we’re looking ahead to help our teen daughter get a solid start to the school year. We have found (as I’m sure many parents have) that a consistent routine plays an important role throughout the entire school year. Our daughter has always been a bit challenged with organizing, and we’ve always helped her to get organized. However, since she started high school a couple of years ago, we’ve had to support her in ways that also help her to be independent as she grows into adulthood.

Here are 5 of the tips we use to help establish a good back-to-school routine.

1)  Get a good night’s sleep. We all let the kids stay up later during the summer; we ourselves even tend to stay up late. A few weeks before school starts it’s a good idea to start going to bed earlier, closer to the time they should be going to sleep come the school year.

2) Get their clothes, lunch and anything else they need for school ready the night before. This is a big one in our home as my daughter tends to dawdle in the morning. We try to get her in the habit of getting as much together as possible the night before. Packing her backpack, getting her lunch ready and laying out some clothes makes things a lot easier in the morning.

3) Have breakfast. We all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it can also be a challenge for teens (and a lot of people) to eat in the morning. My daughter is not hungry when she first gets up, but we try to make sure she has something nutritious to eat every morning. She always has a glass of milk along with some food to eat.  If she hasn’t had enough to eat because she’s not hungry or she’s running behind, she has learned to grab a piece of fruit or a granola bar, or both, to have on the way to school or in between classes.

4) Consistency with everything, like brushing your teeth before school and before bed. Consistency is everything with any routine. We start with the easy stuff like  brushing her teeth. Since she was little she’s known to brush her teeth in the morning and before bed. However, she’s a bit of what I call a lazy brusher, where she sometimes does it a little too quickly or does a half-hearted brushing. That’s why for the last several years she’s always had a Sonicare toothbrush to help her get her tooth-brushing done. Now her new Philips Sonicare 2 Series Plaque Control Rechargeable Toothbrush – with its patented sonic technology to drive fluid deep between teeth and along the gumline for a thorough, yet gentle clean – almost does all the work for her. It’s easy for her to hold and it provides better access to the back teeth and hard-to-reach areas, helping her to properly brush her teeth.

5) Last but not least have a schedule. What we mean by this is when our daughter gets home from school, she unpacks her backpack, takes the leftovers of her lunch out and checks what homework she has to do that evening. From there she can decide if she can have a short break or a longer one before starting her homework. We have found this one to be important as it also ties in with tip#4, being consistent. Know what you have to do that evening and set a schedule for it, so unpacking that backpack as soon as she gets home has to be done on a consistent basis.

We hope these tips help you and your teen. Feel free to share some of your own tips with us in the comment below.

Philips Sonicare uses dynamic cleaning action and patented sonic technology to gently and effectively reach deep between teeth for a superior clean you can see and feel.   Switch to Sonicare 2 Series and remove 6X more plaque than a manual toothbrush.

Disclosure: This post was brought to you by Philips via Mode Media Canada.  The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Philips.