Parenting Your Teenager: 7 Tips for Back to School Success

Blink. That's all we did, blink, and summer is ending and a new school year is beginning.

Parents have mixed emotions. Relief that the kids are going back and dread that another school year, and the battles that come with it, is right around the corner.

Here are tips for a successful school year for students and parents.

Tips for Students

Get a good start. If you start out behind, you dig a hole that you will spend the rest of the year digging out of, if at all.

Get a good finish. Even more important than getting a good start is getting a good finish. Keep doing the positive things you began the year and semester doing. Follow through and finish well.

Duck the personality conflicts. Sometime in your school life, you will run into a teacher with whom you do not get along. Instead of blaming your poor performance on "the teacher doesn't like me," take it as a challenge to learn how to succeed even when someone in authority does not like you. It's good training for the real world.

Beat the procrastination monster - The next time you are tempted to procrastinate, just put it off. Procrastinate about procrastinating and do it now.

Tips for Parents

Promote a love of learning. At some level, most teens are very obedient, in that they will model and copy our behavior and attitudes, the good, the bad and the ugly. Do your kids ever see you reading? Learning something new? Discussing the issues of the day with them? If they get it that learning is held in high esteem in their family, it sets them up to value their own learning as well.

Go to your kid's school. Walk through the halls between classes, walk through the cafeteria during lunch. You need to see that it is not like it was when we were kids.

Some parents find that the car is the best place for this conversation. You have a captive audience and are not staring at each other. Other parents have found that scheduling a 15-minute break during the week to talk about school works well for them.

For many more tips and tools for a great school year, visit Tips for Back to School Success

In The News:

Skygazers will be treated to the “super snow moon,” on Feb. 19, the largest supermoon of 2019.

In November 2016, astronomers watched a young star some 1,500 light-years away from Earth belch out an explosion of plasma and radiation that was roughly 10 billion times more powerful than any flare ever seen leaving Earth's sun. This sudden stellar eruption may be the most luminous known flare ever released by a young star — and it could help scientists better understand the still-murky process of star formation.

An audacious attempt to find explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been called off after the expedition team lost an undersea drone beneath Antarctic ice.

“Our wish is to fly this year,” NASA official Thomas Zurbuchen said at the surprise announcement of a new Moon mission overnight. “We want to incentive speed … We want to start taking shots on goal.”

Bones recently found in a Siberian cave have given researchers a new glimpse into the timeline of an extinct human species. The species – known as Denisovans – at one time lived alongside Neanderthals in the same cave, the evidence showed.

NASA's Opportunity Rover has died on Mars.

A rare 12th-century triple toilet seat will be going on display at a London museum later this year.

Ex-baseball player Jose Canseco has officially joined the group that believes "the truth is out there" and is on the hunt for UFOs and Bigfoot.

MILAN (AP) — Archaeologists have discovered a fresco in an ancient Pompeii residence that portrays the mythological hunter Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.

It’s a river unlike any in Australia — and a fortnight ago it barely existed.

Parenting Your Teenager: 7 Tips for Back to School Success

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