Making your child realize the importance of schooling is vital and essentially can be a challenging task. And when your child’s performance at school is beyond your expectation, you’ll sure to feel disappointed or frustrated.
Here are ways you can encourage your child to be more responsible so he’ll strive to excel the best as he can in his schooling:
1. Get to know your child’s teacher. Try to develop a good rapport with the teacher. If your child realizes that you take serious attention to his school life and performance, chances are, he’ll get serious too.
– Engage with your child’s teacher as regular as possible and make it a point to attend any of your child’s school activity that requires parental involvements.
– Keep in touch with the teacher to get feedback and helpful information on your child’s progress. Find out his behavior, attitude, and how he treats others at school. After that, encourage his positive attributes and put his negative attributes right to help him have a successful school life.
2. Avoid being emotional over your child’s report card. Make it known to your child that the report card belongs to him. Don’t be too emotional when seeing your child’s grades from the report card.
– Be aware that managing the report card as a whole could be quite tricky. If you were to reward your child for subjects with good grades, you might also have to think of how to “penalize” him for those bad ones.
– Avoid punishing him for grades that are below satisfactory.
– Tell your child this: “Those grades are yours and they show you and your teacher how much you know from your lessons.” It will also allow you to control your feelings and emotions instead of letting his grades control them.
– Impress upon your child that the grades belong to him. Help him feel proud of his good grades and at the same time encourage him to work harder on those with less than satisfactory grades. This way, he’s “compelled” to be more responsible and will put more effort into school.
3. Recognize that grades are not everything. Look into other areas on how your child is fairing in school.
– His attitudes, like listening to the teacher’s instructions, mixing well with other children and showing respect to others, are all attributes that count. Tell him that you recognize his efforts in these areas and that they demonstrate he is maturing and growing to be a more pleasing child.
4. Seek out for positive attributes. It helps to refocus from any negatives concerning your child’s performance he portrays at school to positives.
– Although negatives will make you react emotionally, you could address them by letting him know of the consequences of them and what others will think of him.
5. Give praise when it’s due. When you want to praise your child for his positive behaviors, be specific on what he’s done to deserve it. Instead of saying, “Bravo, you did a good job,” say, “I saw that you’d work very hard in coming up with such a fine piece of work, and you did a superb job.”
– Another example of good praise is, “Great job for having mustered all your thoughts on the subject matter and came up with such a good piece of essay.”
– When you’re specific in your praise, you’re reminding him that you’d like the effort from him again the next time around. If your praise is done correctly, your child will see that he’s done the right thing and chances are, and he’ll repeat the excellent work in the future.
6. Don’t show your own emotions when discussing the child’s grades with your child. Avoid showing your child’s feelings on his grades or performance at school.
– Remind yourself that these grades belong to your child, and they merely reflect how your child is doing in school. Getting work up to about them would do little in helping your child take responsibility or put in more effort in his schooling. Strive to help your child to be more interested in schooling and studies.
Implementing the above strategies will help your child take responsibility at school to excel in his studies and be more successful in his years ahead.
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