Dear Parents,
As the exam season looms upon us, it is once again time for us to reflect upon how we have helped our children alongside their quest for academic success. Times have changed, and what our children are learning now may be vastly different from what we used to learn. In light of this, how can we continue to help our children in their studies, and how can we continue to cheer them on from the sidelines, even when they have no motivation to study? Here are some tips by our instructors (tried and tested) to help you along your journey!
Provide Support
We were all students once, and we know how dreadful schoolwork can be, especially for subjects we don’t enjoy. All the more, we must be supportive of our children to help them tide through. Often, children might complain of how bored they are of revising or complain about how uninteresting the subject is, or even how they want to give up because they find certain problems too tough to handle. In these situations, here are 3 steps you can take to support your child.
Providing Support # 1: Acknowledge their feelings
Very often, parents tend to skip this important step and jump straight into reasoning with their children with excessive emphasis on results. However, the simple act of validating their emotions might be a crucial step to take in showing your children that you are actively supporting them. By acknowledging their feelings and demonstrating empathy, your children will feel validated and supported and are less likely to react defensively.
Tip: A simple way in which you can acknowledge their feelings is saying things like “Yes, I know this subject may not be interesting, but…”
Children, upon the acknowledgment of their feelings, are more likely to be able to release, let go and move on from any negative emotions they might be feeling. Validating your children’s feelings can also help to build trust between you and your child!
Providing Support # 2: Reason with them
Reasoning with your children and explaining why they need to revise for their exams, or why they need to finish their work is no easy feat, but it is one that needs to be done. This can be done by explaining how revising for this subject can help them with their future aspirations, or by explaining the importance of this exam for them.
Tip: A tip our instructors would like to share is to highlight the importance of what your children are doing and explain its benefits not just now, but in the long term as well. For instance, if your child is complaining about disliking math, you could explain why math is important to help with the methodical application and can help nurture important qualities like reasoning, abstract or problem-solving abilities.
Providing Support # 3: Give them options
When your children are facing difficulty in their work, try to help them by giving them options. The presence of options gives your children the autonomy to make their own decisions, which can help to empower your children and make them feel important.
Tip: Let them choose if they will want to revise together with you, which school work they want to prioritize in completing first, or let them try by themselves first and then come to you for help if they encounter any issues.
From experience, children tend to be committed to decisions that they have made by themselves, and thus they are more likely to persevere through their revision after making their choice.
Reduce Distractions
Parents, do you find it challenging to get your child to stay focused? Or that they are often distracted with their mobile devices or television screens (even more so with Netflix or Disney+) at home? We know it might be difficult to completely ban the usage of these devices completely.
One way is to set up proper boundaries with the kids is to come up with a proper schedule or house rules detailing when your children should be focusing on revision, and when they are allowed to use their devices. It is important to follow up on these schedules or rules, and make sure that they are strictly adhered to. This will ensure that children spend sufficient time on revision, while also allowing them breaks on their devices. After all, we don’t want insufficient rest to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
For children that are more self-disciplined and do not require such strict rules, parents can encourage them to make use of time management apps such as Plantie. These apps aim to help users stay focused on their tasks and keep them away from distractions such as the usage of other apps on the phone. This helps children to be less distracted by their phones while they revise their work.
Read more on how to better manage their screen time at home
Encourage Responsibility
As parents, we cannot spoon-feed our children forever, no matter how much we may wish to. As Professor Guy Claxton, author of The Learning Power Approach says, “In traditional schools, all the learning design… is done by the teacher. That is efficient, but if we do it completely, all the time, we are depriving our students of opportunities to learn how to design their own learning for themselves. And they will need to be able to do that for the simple reason that they will not be followed around for the rest of their lives by an obliging teacher, telling them what to learn and how.”
It is important to encourage our children to take responsibility and ownership for their own studies – in completing their assignments, in revising for their exams, and even in planning their time well to balance both school and enrichment activities.
In traditional schools, all the learning design… is done by the teacher. That is efficient, but if we do it completely, all the time, we are depriving our students of opportunities to learn how to design their own learning for themselves.
Professor Guy Claxton, The Learning Power Approach
Tip: With more buy-in from students and more motivation to take responsibility for their own decisions, students are also shown to take more ownership of their own learning when they have a say in their own learning experience. Let children handle large projects from the get go, including the planning and execution stages, so that they can experience creating a project from scratch. They might even nurture better time management habits through this.
Avoid a Reward System
Reward systems are a great way to encourage and reinforce positive behaviors, such as proper revision or completing assignments on time. However, as children get used to such reward systems, there may be an extinction effect, which is when children learn to stop the behavior when they are not rewarded. Hence, reward systems keep children expecting more, which may not be a good thing in the long run.
Instead, we should encourage our children to be intrinsically motivated, which means that we should encourage our children to cultivate an interest in the revision of their exams, which would then give them a sense of self-satisfaction when they complete it.
More often than not, these tips have served us well in the classroom, and hopefully, they will be useful in your homes as well. Above all else, remember to be understanding – even when your child is throwing up a tantrum. Build trust, foster your relationship with your child, and all’s well that ends well.