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We’re at the Start of a Fresh School Year

Which means it’s time to think about helping your children be as successful in school as they can be.

That includes resisting the temptation either to push children so much that they fear never meeting up to your expectations or to neglect staying involved so they feel unimportant. In other words it means meeting your children where they each are—be it deep in anxiety and school resistance or excited for new challenges.

Meeting our children in the present can be the toughest challenge of parenting. Fears keep us setting expectations for the child we want rather than the child we have. When our expectations get the better of us, school success becomes less likely.

Behavior is Your Clue

In my book, Confident Parents, Remarkable Kids: 8 Principles for Raising Kids You’ll Love to Live With, one principle states, “Behavior is your clue”. Behavior is what we have to tell us how our children are doing—whether or not they feel in balance with themselves and with their world. When a child feels balanced, her internal needs are met and her behavior reflects that balance. When a child is behaving unacceptably, it signals an unmet need, not a problem child. In other words, it means your child is having a problem not being a problem.

When we use external motivators like sticker charts, prizes and money for grades or withdrawing privileges to motivate “good” behavior and taking away a phone for poor grades or incomplete assignments, we ignore the cause of the behavior, the underlying motive. When we use external motivators, fear tactics, or do their work for them, we take responsibility for their academic work rather than encouraging their responsibility. We simply manipulate behavior to get what we want.

Another principle is, “All children want to be successful”. This means all children are born intrinsically motivated to please the most important people in their lives. Rewards and punishments interfere with that process. They ask them to ignore their natural, intrinsic motivation and shift focus to external motivators, because we don’t have the patience for or the understanding of their developmental and temperamental needs. We simply ask the child to meet our needs. Hence we set them up to be unsuccessful.

8 ways to help your child this school year:

1. Be considerate of the match between your child and the school environment—don’t force square pegs into round holes. Sometimes changing the environment and its expectations can strongly affect your child’s behavior. Different schools for different temperaments. Set expectations considerate of your child’s temperamental, neurological, and developmental needs. Do not assume you can change your child’s innate biology to suit you or the school.
2. If you have no school choice, become your child’s best advocate. Set up a conference with your teacher at the beginning of the year. Let your child’s teacher know what helps and doesn’t help your child at home. Educate them about your child. Discuss your child’s temperamental qualities. Example: “Whenever I use time out, my child’s behavior escalates. I have learned that when I stay calm and give him choices and acknowledge what is difficult for him, he calms.”
3. Remember that children do well when they can. Don’t get stuck in the traditional perception that disruptive behavior is on purpose, disrespectful, and oppositional. Acting out behavior and school resistance needs to be taken seriously and not punitively. It can indicate boredom in school, feeling lost and behind, or bullying. If your child is not doing well, if her behavior is unacceptable, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to do well. It means she can’t right now. Your job is to figure out why. Not to punish or threaten her because of her behavior.
4. Do not let homework interfere with your relationship with your child. The foundation of connected family relationships is more important than fighting over homework. Be interested in what your children are studying and allow many conversations to spin off from that. But avoid homework battles by letting your children know that homework is their job. If they want your help, you are there for the asking, but if they don’t want to do it, that will be between the teacher and your child (a special needs child requires a lot more help and motivation to be successful). They will much more readily take responsibility for their homework when you stay out of the nagging, pushing and threatening that so often becomes the daily norm.
5. Do not use or endorse external motivators. Manipulating behavior encourages children to answer to extrinsic cues—you may get behavior you want but only as long as the cue is present and either feared or desired. Punishment increases internal, unmet needs, and rewards work only as long as the external cue is desirable. After awhile the child loses trust in her own internal cues. Your school may use these methods. They have a classroom of kids to manage. No reason for you to use them at home. (Some special needs children can create good habits with behavioral charts and motivators).
6. Ask your child what he would like to accomplish this coming year, how he would like the year to end. What grades would he like at the end of the year? If he were to overhear his teacher talking about him in the hallway, what would he like to hear the teacher saying? Ask him to think about what he needs to do over the year to make that happen.
7. Make sure your child understands that school/education is for her—not for you or her teachers. Too many children feel like they are in prison for 12 years and must please the adults in their lives, so have no interest in their own learning. In order to put this into practice, you must allow your child to have agency in her school work and life. She will only take responsibility for it when you stop. This may mean some failures.
8. Advocate for no homework in elementary school. If it is given, tell your teacher you are not willing to fight with your child over it. If he wants to do it, fine. If not, it will be between them.

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