I also have a 14 year-old 8th grade boy at home. I had similar issues, but read a book entitled, "Parenting Teens With Love And Logic: Preparing Adolescents For Responsible Adulthood". I believe the most current edition was published May 31, 2006. There are several Love and Logic Books out there by Foster Cline and Jim Fay. It was the best parenting book that I've ever read. It states that if parents are constantly not allowing their child/teen to fail (by checking with teachers for missing assignment, by running forgotten homework to school when the teen has forgotten it etc.) then the child/teen will never learn to be responsible. They have to fail and take the consequences in order to learn from them. My son didn't worry about things because he knew that if he didn't do something or if he forgot something, I would come to his rescue and fix it. The sooner you allow him to accept his own consequences, the sooner he will learn to be more responsible. I would highly recommend reading the book (maybe from your local library). I hope that this helps.
Traci
When homework tasks are given we spend a good time together brainstorming how it can be done in the time allowed. We break it up into tasks to do each day. I check each task off dail \y to make sure they are on track. The other thing I do is that I do not allow for them to ask for extentions on homework....if they havnt planned well and completed their homework they need to learn there are consequences to that from a young age. Extentions etc just teach them that deadlines are there to be broken.
My children all have excellent homework records because of this....and they learnt very young that it is better to pace themselves thru...I do think it is up to the parents to moniter them thru it tho...thats what we are there for.
My son is now 16 and going to be a Junior in High School. I have talked to a lot of parents about this issue and discovered that nearly every middle school aged boy is the same. So don't sweat it to much, however you can't ignore it. What I have found to work the best is to let him know that his cell phone, spending time with his friends and skateboarding (or whatever he is into at the time) are privileges and in order to continue to have those privileges he needs to be responsible and hand in his work. Because he too did well on most of the work that he did actually hand in, I told him that if he would just at least hand it in on time no matter what the grade was that he would end up with all A's and B's in the end, so I didn't care if he even got an F on the assignment I just wanted him to get in the habit of getting in on time. This was the best thing I ever did because instead of constantly arguing with him and always being the bad guy for telling him that he couldn't hang out with friends, all I had to say was, "I don't know, can you play?" and he would hop on the internet and check his grades himself. Now at first this system worked out great and definitely solved the problem with handing in his work on time however things had to be changed up a bit once he started High School. He wasn't real happy when I told him that now he couldn't get an F on any assignments. It didn't take him long to adjust though.
Good luck,
Dawna
These are great suggestions and I will try them both out and see what one works better for us. Thanks again for your help