I raised three children, and
taught high school English for 37 years.
Here is what I saw:
Almost always, the more pressure
you put on a child to do well, the less effective that pressure becomes over
the years. I had high school students
who did almost nothing, but told me that their parents were successful getting
them to work in the early grades. But by
high school that oversight and pressure had so sapped any internal motivation
that the kids stopped working almost completely. The only exception I saw to this were kids
with serious learning disabilities who really did need day to day help in
coping with academic demands.
The only solution I ever saw work
for a child whose own motivation had been so eviscerated by parental control
was to make sure that child was in as nurturing and interesting an academic
situation as possible, and then stand back.
While it’s true your child will
not, then, have the grades to get into a competitive college, unless he develops
internal motivation he won’t succeed in college anyway. And it’s much cheaper to have a child fail
high school courses than to fail college courses. I’ve known kids whose parents pulled them
through high school with pressure and punishments and tutors, and then had to
watch them fail out of college—often after paying twenty or thirty thousand for
that first college year.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/how-can-you-make-a-student-care-enough-to-work-harder/
No comments:
Post a Comment