It was a typical November day when my then high school aged daughter came home from school and announced she wouldn’t be returning on Monday. When I asked her why she told me she quit. Thinking quickly I decided against an argument so instead of arguing with her I told her simply that she would need to have a job if she wasn’t in school. My thoughts were that no one in our area would hire a 15 year old high school drop out and she’d give up in a short time and return to school. Within a week, my daughter had a full time job working at a local sandwich shop. I was wrong.
Assess the situation
There are many questions to ask when a teen wants to quit school. Why does the teen want to quit school? Is there a problem in the school? Is your child bored or struggling? Is there any bullying going on?
Have you set up a meeting with the school counselor and your child? Sometimes the school counselor can help the child to see that their decision is a bad one (often teens will listen better to another adult than they will to a parent).
In our case, our daughter had changed schools in the middle of 8th grade. She wasn’t happy about it and things had begun to go downhill from there. At the end of her 9th grade year we had to move and she was again in another school district. We had put her in a private school for a time but we were unable to afford it for long and she was returning to a public school that she didn’t like. None of these things were in our control and she wasn’t listening to the voice of reason. At 15 she thought she knew everything so I gave her a chance to prove what she did know.
Is distance learning or homeschooling an option?
Stressing to our daughter that she needed to have a diploma or a GED to get much farther in life she was encouraged to study for her GED. Although she balked at first, when our daughter was 16 she began the process of earning her GED (General Education Development). She scored very well and just before she was 17 she had passed and earned her GED. If a child is bored in school and knows the information this is an excellent route to go. In our daughters case, she was bored in school and this worked perfectly.
For others, there are online high school programs and homeschools that can assist a student in either earning a GED or a high school diploma.
Getting a job
If a teen isn’t going to be attending school then they need to have some sort of responsibility during the day. Allowing a teen to just be lazy and sleep all day and stay up all night isn’t conducive to a healthy lifestyle and will eventually begin to eat at the rest of the family.
Although I didn’t expect our 15 year old daughter to come in a week later and announce that she had a job, it worked out very well. She had to follow her supervisors direction and she learned some valuable people skills. She also fine tuned her math skills by working with the cash register and learning to make change. She showed that she had responsibility and by the time she was 17 she was manager of the sandwich shop she was working in.
Life skills
Teens will need life skills to survive when they leave home. Teaching them to be responsible and follow through is a good beginning for these skills. If a teen isn’t going to school they should be actively seeking a job or gainfully employed. Encouraging the teen to live at home and work for a time will help them to adjust to the working world. Teen that leave home and try to make it on their own before they are adequately prepared often take life threatening risks and fall into the wrong company.
Thankfully, it worked out very well for our daughter. She worked for the same company for 9 years and then went on to another company. She has done very well. Once we identified the problem (bored in school) and she saw that we weren’t forcing her into a school she didn’t want to attend she cooperated and got her GED and had a job as well. She learned money management and life skills that today have really paid off for her.