Teenage Procrastination: Let’s Focus on the Cause, Not the Effect

Teenagers are incredibly confusing. How could teens think eating Tide Pods was a smart idea? Why do they spend hours every day on Snapchat aimlessly taking pictures of themselves? What makes teens want to stay up so late, well aware that they will be miserable the next morning? While these teenage tendencies have gained a lot of attention, no one seems to ask the question: why do teens procrastinate?

It’s easy to accuse your Netflix-addicted adolescent of being lazy or unmotivated, but this is unproductive in changing their procrastinative behavior. Blaming it on inherent character flaws only worsens the problem at hand. Procrastination isn’t a result of laziness, it’s a result of inadequate emotional regulation and control. People don’t voluntarily push things off because they want the last-minute stress, but because it’s “a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks,” explains Charlotte Lieberman for the New York Times.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you have a paper due at the end of the week. You want a good grade, so procrastinating would seem irrational, right? Well, yes and no. You barely passed the last writing assignment, and are beginning to question your writing abilities entirely. So instead of starting early, you acquire the mindset: if I get a bad grade on this paper, it will be because I started late. It’s with this self-doubt you choose to cope with it through procrastinating: minimizing failure, but also minimizing success.

“In general, people learn from their mistakes and reassess their approach to certain problems,” describes Eric Jaffe from the Association for Psychological Science, but procrastination is different. Jaffe furthers that “For chronic procrastinators, that feedback loop seems continually out of service.” So instead of learning from failure, it only continues to drive this procrastination, soon evolving into a dangerous and endless cycle of delay and avoidance.

While this cycle of pushing things off can occur at all ages, from not putting your doll away to avoiding those dreaded tax returns, teenagers are affected the hardest. Teens are thrown into the ring with social and cognitive struggles, which knock them down constantly. They’re trying to make sense of themselves, and procrastination only compounds onto this struggle. But to only make matters worse, adults like to blame this cycle on the teenagers, not on what causes it. It’s time we worry less about how much teenagers procrastinate, and instead focus on why they do it in the first place. Let’s focus on the cause, not the effect.