How to help your kid learn efficiently in online school: low-effort changes that actually work
Last October, I peeked over my 13-year-old daughter Lila’s shoulder mid-Zoom math class and found exactly what I’d suspected: Zoom was muted and minimized in one corner of her laptop, and TikTok filled the rest of the screen. Crumbs from a peanut butter cracker were ground into the keyboard, her water bottle had rolled under the desk, and when I tapped her shoulder, she jumped a mile and snapped that she was “paying attention, just taking notes.” Her quiz grade that Friday was a 58.
I did what most parents would do first: I yelled. I made her move her work to the kitchen table where I could see her every second. I made her turn her phone off and leave it in my room. That lasted two days. Lila got so snappy she wouldn’t eat dinner with us, and I caught her hiding an old spare phone under the table to text her friends. Her next quiz grade was even lower. I called my sister, a middle school tech teacher who’s done hybrid learning since before the pandemic, and asked her what I was doing wrong.
She didn’t tell me Lila was lazy or I was too strict or I needed to buy some fancy $200 study desk. She said the problem isn’t kids getting distracted—it’s that online learning doesn’t come with all the unspoken structures that in-person school has. “When they’re at school, someone else tells them when to move, when to stop, where to sit, and what’s off limits. At home, all that is gone, and you can’t expect a kid to build it all out of nothing,” she said. She gave me a handful of tiny, low-effort changes to try, and they worked better than I expected.
First, we sorted out the screen and phone rule, but it’s not “no phones allowed.” It’s one screen for work, one purpose. Lila does all Zoom classes and school work on her laptop. Her phone goes in a woven basket on our kitchen counter, 10 feet away from her work space, before class starts. We set a timer for 25 minutes, and when it goes off, she can get up, get a snack, check her texts for 5 minutes, then go back. I used to think she needed her phone for school stuff like calculators, so we grabbed a $10 physical calculator from the Target dollar spot, and that solves that. The first day, she got up to check her basket three times in the first hour. By the third day, she forgot it was there half the time. The week we started that, she finished all her work by 3:30 instead of dragging it out until dinner, and she even had time to bake chocolate chip cookies after school—something she swore she never had time for before.
Next, we fixed the work space, but not in the way I thought I had to. I used to think she needed a proper desk with an ergonomic chair in a completely quiet room. Turns out Lila likes sitting on a floor cushion better than a hard desk chair, and she likes having the window open to hear the neighbors’ dog play. The only rule we have is that work doesn’t happen in bed. Before, she did all her classes propped up on pillows, which is where she also scrolls, naps, and hangs out with her old stuffed animals. Her brain couldn’t tell the difference between “it’s time to focus” and “it’s time to relax.” We got a $15 folding card table from Walmart and set it up in the corner of her room by the window, and that’s only for online class and work. We taped a big piece of construction paper to the wall behind it, and that’s where she writes down all her upcoming due dates by hand. No fancy digital apps, no constant reminders from me—she can see it every time she looks up during Zoom. It’s messy, it’s not the Instagram-perfect homework nook, but it works.
The last two small routines we added take less than 10 minutes total a day. Five minutes before class starts, Lila does three quick things: close all extra tabs on her laptop, grab a full water bottle and any supplies she needs (textbook, notebook, calculator), and stand up to stretch for 30 seconds. Before, she’d roll out of bed two minutes before class, log on, then realize she forgot her textbook or was thirsty, and leave halfway through to get what she needed, missing half the lesson. After class, she takes two minutes to write down any homework or upcoming assignments on that construction paper list, then closes her laptop. Before, she’d log off and close the laptop immediately, then forget what the teacher said she needed to do, and panic the night before it was due.
It’s not perfect. Some days, she’s tired and forgets to put her phone in the basket, or she does work on her bed because she’s coming down with a cold, and I don’t nag her about it every single time. When Lila went back to in-person school after her two weeks of strep, I thought we’d forget all these little tricks, but last month she signed up for an online driver’s ed course, and I walked past her room and saw she had already set up the card table, put her phone in the basket, and written her class times on the construction paper, all without me asking. Her first test grade was an 89.
I still think it’s wild that we expect kids to just figure out online learning on their own, when it’s such a different experience than sitting in a classroom. These changes don’t require a lot of time, money, or effort. They’re just small ways to add back the structure that online learning leaves out. Some days it works, some days it doesn’t, and that’s fine. We’re still figuring it out as we go.
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