Parenting Tips: How to Help Your Kid Survive Daily 10 Hour School Days
I’m leaning against my car in the middle school car rider line last Tuesday, sipping lukewarm coffee that’s been sitting in the cupholder since 7 AM, when I see my 8th grader Jake round the corner of the building. His hood is pulled up over his hair, his backpack strap slips off one shoulder, and he doesn’t even look up to wave when he reaches the car. He just yanks the door open, drops his gear at my feet, and slumps into the passenger seat. For the 20 minute drive home, he doesn’t say a word. When we pull into the driveway, he looks over at me with red, tired eyes and says, “That was 10 hours. I can’t do another 10 hours tomorrow.”
When the school year started, our district rolled out a new extended day schedule to make up for pandemic-era learning gaps. For kids who do any before or after school activities, that adds up to a full 10 hours inside the building: from the time they walk in for early band at 6:50 AM to the time they walk out after robotics at 4:50 PM. That’s longer than most full-time adult work days, with only a 25 minute lunch and two 5 minute passing periods for breaks. For the first six weeks, I tried all the standard stuff: I packed nutrient-dense homemade lunches, quizzed him on study guides on the drive home, told him it would get easier as he adjusted. But by mid-September, he was falling asleep over his math homework at 7 PM, and snapped at his little sister for accidentally touching his Game Boy twice in one week. I started texting the other 8th grade parents in my neighborhood, and turns out almost all of us were dealing with the same thing. Half the kids came home too drained to do anything but zone out, and half the parents were stressed because homework wasn’t getting done, and dinner turned into a fight every night. I started testing small changes, nothing fancy, just little tweaks to our routine that made a big difference.
The first thing I changed was getting rid of the “start homework right away” rule. I’d always heard you should knock homework out while it’s still fresh, but after a 10 hour day, a kid’s brain is just as fried as an adult’s after a 10 hour shift. We now have a non-negotiable 30 minute “no demands” window the second he walks in the door. No asking him about his test, no asking him to take the trash out, no making him talk if he doesn’t want to. He can do whatever he wants that doesn’t require active focus: lay on the couch and watch dumb skate TikTok compilations, mess around with his old Lego collection, pet the dog, even nap if he wants. The first week I did this, I was worried he’d lose all motivation to do homework, but 30 minutes is just enough to recharge. Most days, he gets up on his own after that half hour and goes to his room to work.
Next, I stopped packing fancy snacks. I used to spend 10 minutes every night cutting up apples, portioning hummus into little containers, making homemade energy bites that took forever to prep. But Jake told me he never had time to eat all that. Between passing periods and lunch, he barely had 30 minutes total of unstructured time all day, and half of that was spent waiting in line for the bathroom. He’d end up throwing most of the fancy snacks away because he didn’t have time to unwrap them or eat them slowly. Now I just pack two grab-and-bite snacks, no prep required: a whole banana, a pre-wrapped cheese stick, a full-sized granola bar, and a small bag of pretzels. I put one in the front pocket of his backpack for mid-morning, one in the side pocket for 2 PM, when his energy always crashes. I even wrote “EAT ME BEFORE 3 PM” on the second snack with a Sharpie, because he used to forget to eat it and save it for later, then be starving by the time he got home. That one change cut down on after-school grumpiness more than anything else I tried.
The third shift we made was cutting one non-required thing, no guilt. Jake had signed up for early band, robotics, and intramural basketball at the start of the year, and I was proud he wanted to do all three. But adding basketball practice right after robotics pushed his day to 10 and a half hours, and he was exhausted every single day. I sat down with him one night after he fell asleep at the dinner table and said we could drop one, no questions, no shame. He thought about it for a minute and chose to drop basketball, even though he liked playing, because he cared more about robotics. If your kid’s 10 hour day is all required school, no extra activities, you can still cut something at home: skip the nightly chore, skip the extra 20 minutes of reading they’re supposed to do for fun one night a week, skip the family walk if they just want to sit. It doesn’t make you a bad parent, and it doesn’t spoil them. It’s just giving them back 20 minutes of rest.
I talked to Jake’s homeroom teacher at conferences last week, and she said she sees this every day now. The last two hours of the extended day, half the kids are staring out the window, too tired to participate. We ask a lot of kids these days, and a 10 hour school day is a lot to ask, no matter how old they are. It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s that their brains need down time, just like ours do.
It’s not perfect. Some Wednesdays, when he has a test and a long robotics meeting, he still comes out to the car with red eyes and doesn’t talk the whole way home. Some days he forgets his afternoon snack anyway, and we have to stop for fast food on the way home because he’s too hungry to wait for dinner. But most days now, he gets through it, and he even has enough energy to mess around with his sister after homework before bed. We’re still adjusting, figuring out what works week to week. I don’t think there’s a magic fix for a 10 hour school day, but these small changes have made it a lot more bearable, for him and for me.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Parenting Tips: How to Help Your Kid Survive Daily 10 Hour School Days