It's difficult to know exactly how and when to give feedback to your young budding writers at home.

How do you help teens with writing, without taking over and putting too much of yourself into it?

You want to support your kids and guide them to be good writers. That’s not going to happen if you write their papers for them. And using AI to compose their papers is absolutely NOT going to teach them how to write!

AI is a tool that can help with certain aspects of writing, but our kids need to learn how write themselves.

Kids need to develop their own original voice and express that in their writing.

So, what can a parent do?

Below, I’m going to share the 5-step writing process we use in our Essay Rockstar program. Our kids apply this process repeatedly while composing several different types of essays during the program. Feel free to use it!

Then, I’ll share what steps in the process kids can receive direct outside help without being guilty of plagiarism.

Finally, I’ll show you how to help your kids with their critical thinking skills so they can fix content problems in their essays themselves.

You’ll see how to help your teens with their writing while their work remains their own.

Essay Rockstar’s 5-Step Writing Process 

1. Brainstorming to generate content ideas.

First and foremost, children need to let their ideas flow. Interesting, thoughtful, content is the primary goal in writing, and this is the first step toward that goal.

In this step, it’s ok for kids to seek out content ideas and suggestions from outside sources like family members, friends, or even AI. However, if they choose to use content ideas from outside sources, they must develop those ideas in writing themselves.

2. Organizing ideas into an outline.

Kids need to do this step largely on their own. It’s up to them to use their own critical thinking skills to decide which content ideas to include, and what to write about each one.

You can use Socratic questioning to help them, but you can’t do it for them. Please scroll down past step 5 of our writing process to learn about Socratic questioning.

3. Writing the first draft of a paper.

Kids “free write” their first draft. They explain and flesh out their content ideas in rough paragraph form, with no concern over grammar and punctuation at this time. Their outline is their writing guide.

Again, kids need to do this step themselves. They must develop their own thoughts, observations, and conclusions on their subject. Use Socratic questioning to help your kids work through problems you see in their content here.

4. Revising their draft to add structure and shape their content into a formal essay.

You can help them with this directly, but it must be done without changing their content ideas. To be honest, I don’t believe AI applications can help with this step. Every time I’ve experimented with using AI for revision, it rearranges my content and changes my meaning, entirely.

5. Final editing for grammar and punctuation corrections.

Family members, friends, and grammar correction applications like Grammarly can absolutely help with this step!

How to Use Socratic Questioning to Help Kids with Their Writing 

In steps 2 and 3 of the writing process above, socratic questioning is the best way to help your kids and keep their work their own.

Basically, Socratic questions ask WHY.

For example, when you’re reading over your children’s work, you might ask them clarification questions like:

Why do you say that?
What do you mean by that?
Why is this important?

Sometimes you’ll feel that they need to develop or support an idea further. In that case, you can ask them questions like:

What would be an example here?
What led you to draw that conclusion?
What would someone who had a different point of view say? How would you respond to them?
What are the benefits of ______?

Socratic questioning guides your kids to clarify their thoughts and improve their arguments. The idea behind this form of questioning is to help students get to the truth of the matter.

More importantly, Socratic questioning helps our kids develop their critical thinking skills. Over time as they grow and develop, they’ll be able to respond to this type of questioning with more depth and complex thinking.

When you’re doing Socratic questioning with your kids, don’t bombard them, even if it means their writing remains imperfect. Be sure to include positive feedback in your review of their work. If they get overwhelmed or start to shut down, back off and leave it alone.

Critical thinking is a learned skill for many, and it takes time and repeated practice.