The Transition to High School/Secondary School: Must-Read Tips for Parents
Why your involvement is so important
It’s natural to want to step back and give your teen more space as he or she starts high school/secondary school.
You don’t want to be the dreaded helicopter parent, hovering over your teen’s every move, or the “snowplow parent,” constantly removing obstacles … so your teen never learns how to fend for himself/herself and become a responsible adult
But at the same time, there needs to be balance.
High school is a BIG transition for your teen, and this year it may also mean transitioning back to in-person school from a hybrid/virtual experience.
In moving from middle school/primary school to high school/secondary school, many kids discover that school is a larger, more competitive, less personal environment than in the past.
In the first year of high school, your teen is going to face:
- Bigger academic challenges than ever before—with the impact of COVID learning loss on top of that. Let’s face it, school has not been ideal and while some students thrived in the hybrid/virtual environment, many who had typically done well in school found themselves struggling.
- New levels of pressure and stress, which may include integrating back to in-person school.
- Independent choices about whether to engage in risky behaviors (such as drinking and drugs) that could have a lasting impact.
- And taking the pandemic into consideration, there is the concern that the rates of anxiety and depression are higher as students dealt with/are dealing with the trauma of COVID.
Your high school student needs you as a parent.
And, the transition isn’t just academic! Here are some tips for helping your teen prepare for high school emotionally.
Here’s how to help your teen make the academic leap to high school/secondary school—all while empowering your teen.
9th grade is a pivotal academic year
Research shows that:
- Your teen’s grade point average (GPA) in grade 9 can be a major predictor of his or her overall GPA for the high school years.
- A wide range of students experience poor performance in 9th grade—and NOT just those who did poorly in 8th grade.
- 35% of all students fail at least one class during 9th grade.
During freshman year, your teen will get the academic foundation for the rest of high school/secondary school.
Concepts often build on one another, particularly in math and language arts. For example, if your teen is taking Algebra 1 in 9th grade, it’s an extension of the skills your teen learned in middle school.
But many teens feel overwhelmed because algebra seems to have so many new rules. Algebra 1 can feel really abstract! (It can help to relate the rules your teen is learning to the math skills he or she already knows.)
As your teen advances into more difficult courses, the key to mastering higher-level concepts is having those core skills down. If your teen doesn’t, he or she may struggle—sometimes severely—through the next four years.
Ronda Arking, Director of Language Arts at Sylvan and mother to three teenage boys, shares, “One thing that’s very surprising for parents is the amount of writing that high school students have to do.”
That said, Arking notes, there’s not a lot of time during the school day dedicated to writing instruction. Students are just expected to know how to do it.
“What we did in our freshman year of college/university, kids are now doing in high school — things like conducting research, using evidence, including MLA citations. High school/secondary school writing is much more sophisticated than even 10 years ago.”
Writing assignments extend far beyond English class. With Common Core (and similar types of curriculum), writing is an expected part of math, science and history courses too.
