Attention Parents of Junior Students

The junior year can be stressful thinking about future possibilities. To assist your child in making a smooth transition after high school, we meet with each junior student and their parents. This meeting, called “Facilitating the Future”,will take approximately 30 minutes during the school day and will focus on your student’s future goals. This conference is important in planning for the final year at OregonHigh School.  Whether your student is planning to attend college, enter the military, find an apprenticeship, or enter the workforce directly this conference will be helpful for you.

Our goal is to have met with each family by the end of January.  Over the next few months we will be mailing home letters with your individual meeting time.  Please share this info with your student. 

Topics covered will be: Course selection for senior year, Graduation Requirements, Transcript Review, Test Scores, Post Secondary Options, ACT/SAT Testing, Financial Aid/Scholarships,  WisCareer Site www.wiscareers.wisc.edu

Timely Topics

Is Your Teen A Textaholic?

How many text messages is your teen sending and receiving per day? According to the Nielsen Company, the answer is about 80. Yep! Eighty text messages in one day…not in a year…but just one day! It makes my brain…and thumbs…and wallet hurt just thinking about it. To make matters even scarier, a study by AAA recently reported that 46% of teens admit texting while driving. Ouch!

Maybe these studies are flawed, causing these numbers to be inaccurately elevated. Anything's possible. Let's say that teens only send and receive 40 texts per day…and that only 23% of them admit texting while driving. Yikes, that's still high!

Data like this tempts me to do some pretty ineffective things with my kids. These include quitting my job so that I can follow them around all of the time, using duct tape to restrain their thumbs and fingers, moving the family to a cell-phone-free zone within the Arctic Circle, yelling, screaming, etc.

Particularly with teens, all we really have control over is:
How we act around them
What we provide for them

Rather than moving to an igloo, it's far wiser to model responsible cell phone use and to set firm limits over who pays for the phone. This might sound like, "Honey, you may have a phone when you can pay for it. If it will help any, you can just tell your friends that your parents are so old fashioned that they think that talking face to face with your friends is better than texting. And…by the way…we love you and would miss you if you died while texting behind the wheel."
 
Thanks for reading!
Dr. Charles Fay
 
©2009 Charles Fay. Ph.D. All copyright infringement laws apply. Permission granted for photocopy reproduction and forwarding. Please do not alter or modify contents. For more information, call the Love and Logic® Institute, Inc. at (800) 338-4065.