As the baccalaureate or the patent approaches, revisions often turn into a family tug of war because of smartphones. But a world-renowned technique can boost your teenager’s concentration and bring peace to the house, without any frustration.
It has become a great classic of parent-teen conflicts, especially during revision periods: the screen war. As the end-of-year exams approach, whether for the college certificate, the baccalaureate or even the partial exams for students, the question is practically inevitable for parents concerned about the academic success of their children. Should we completely ban the telephone during the revision phases? How can we prevent students from getting distracted by social networks, without triggering a nervous breakdown by confiscating their smartphone?
Because all parents know: talking to a teenager to make them see reason is often a wasted effort… and requisitioning their phone is guaranteed to cause an argument. Eyes rolling, names of birds and an icy atmosphere await you for sure. However, there is a method that works miracles because it allows you to find the right balance between concentration and time for yourself. As a result, the teenager learns to manage his revision time without frustration or deprivation: we make him responsible, we do not punish him.
This method is the famous Pomodoro® technique, tested and approved by millions of people around the world for more than 30 years. It was developed by an Italian student, Francesco Cirillo, who was looking for a way to stop getting distracted. This is why it is extremely effective for students in the middle of an exam (but also for adults who want to concentrate on an important task!). At the end of the 80s, while trying to concentrate, he came across a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (which is called “pomodoro” in Italian), which would become the basis of his method: set the timer for 25 minutes, the time to accomplish a specific task, then take a 5-minute break.
So, for revisions, it is a question of dividing your time and setting small objectives such as studying the chapter on the Renaissance for example. Then, when the timer goes off, we stop dead in our tracks, even if the sentence we were reading isn’t finished. The goal is to pace the effort. The 5 minutes of break are obligatory, and essential: we stretch, we drink a glass of water… or we scroll on TikTok, it doesn’t matter. Then we get back to it. After four cycles of 25 minutes (or about two hours), we take a real big break of 15 to 30 minutes.
This method is the perfect deal for teenagers: instead of banning the phone, we integrate it into the system. Knowing that he will be able to look at his notifications very soon, his brain is freer to work. In addition, we break procrastination: saying “go revise your baccalaureate for 3 hours” creates an insurmountable mountain. Telling him “you’re just sitting down for 25 minutes” is psychologically much easier to accept. And precisely, a student who does four effective “pomodoros” in a day has worked 1 hour 40 minutes in total concentration. It’s often much more productive than four hours spent in front of a notebook thinking about something else… or looking at your phone every two minutes!
