There are many ways your child can succeed.
It isn’t always about grades, although there are ways that your involvement can help a child get better grades, so keep that in mind.
This article simply covers some of the aspects of student success when parents are involved, and it covers several of the pitfalls, negative sides and traps that you as a parent should try to avoid.
Table of Contents
Learning is Boring
This is the sad reality of modern education.
In fact, in many cases throughout history, learning has become synonymous with boredom simply because of the way children are taught.
Testing by its very nature means that children are forced to draw between the lines.
Textbooks and curriculum demand that children are taught something within certain boundaries, with little reward for exploring one idea or subject beyond its bounds, and plenty of punishment for abandoning one subject or idea in order to pursue another.
Independent learning can be fun and is one of the few ways that children can express their intellectual curiosity.
Sadly, a child is so turned away from the learning experience after school that many children struggle to break free from its mindset after higher education.
Yet, with parental involvement, it is possible to see the pleasure and fun that learning has.
A parent can show how learning will open doors. Children have a bond with their parents and getting attention from a parent is a reward in itself.
Even if your child is being forced to study something boring and something that doesn’t interest them, being able to learn with a parent rather than alone is still pretty rewarding for the child.
It helps to negate the feeling that learning is boring or a chore.
It may not remove the damage that modern education does, especially higher education, but it does help mediate the damage so that a child may finish higher education and still seek out knowledge and learning for its own sake rather than doing so simply further their career.
Policing Your Child
The term “Tiger Parenting” is thrown around a lot, and in most cases it is a pretty bad thing.
Pushing your child into academic success is simply setting up massive rebellion later down the line, and yet many parents subscribe to Tiger Parenting because the results seem to come in thick and fast.
The positives roll in quickly and over a fairly long term, and the negatives creep in very slowly and quietly.
Over time, the child becomes more devious and lies more. They learn new ways to work around their authoritarian parents.
They are forced to become better lairs and find new ways to cheat and be lazy.
Children also become more likely to have a “Blow out” rebellion at a later stage, and it often spirals into something that is both self-destructive for the child and highly damaging for the parent-child relationship.
Think of all those late 80s parents and early 90s parents who subscribed to the “Just Say No” drugs campaigns. They spent a lot of time demonizing drugs and lying about drugs to their kids.
Then, when their kids actually tried drugs and didn’t go blind, didn’t become destitute, and didn’t die, their kids went nuts with drug taking and started questioning everything their parents had ever taught them.
A similar thing happens when parents try to “Tiger Parent” their kids. Your kids go from heeding your every word to questioning everything you have ever told them, until they are doing drugs, having underage sex, and climbing tight walk ropes over skyscrapers.
If you are taking an active role in your child’s academic success, then steer clear of tiger parenting, and take an active interest in what your children are actually doing.
Police them without becoming authoritarian.
For example, instead of barking questions at your children like asking if they have done their homework, ask if they want help doing it, ask to see it, and get involved in what they are doing.
Have them present their work to you, and rather than telling them how to improve it, ask how they would make it better.
Ask which parts they struggled on, and which parts they think are the best.
Police your child in a way that makes it difficult for them to lie to you, and you can do this by simply remembering their homework routine and by remembering their responses.
That way, when they say they don’t have any homework tonight, you can pull them up on their lie when they are rushing to finish the overdue work in a few days.
Try Extra-Curricular Tasks That Encourage Learning
Consider something like coding for kids and even consider teaching your child to code yourself.
Be very careful when it comes to extra-curricular activities because it is very easy to slip into tiger parenting mode.
The hardest part for some parents is how their children can be very enthusiastic about something extra-curricular, and they can even become very good at it, and then suddenly they want to stop.
Sometimes they want to stop because they stopped enjoying it a while ago and were only going on because it made you happy.
Other times it is because they are being picked on for their activity (either within the activity itself by other participants, or by their regular school friends).
Though the most common reason is simply because your kid became bored of the extra-curricular activity.
By all means, add whatever extra-curricular subject they were doing to their CV, and then move on and find something else.
Try to find things that you can both do together because it will add an extra dimension to the activity.
Even if it is a sport, there are plenty of ways you can get involved without embarrassing your kid.
Don’t Be a Stickler About Success
A large portion of this article was dedicated to the trappings of becoming a Tiger Parent, and the biggest reason for that is because Tiger Parenting is very easy to fall into and is actually very damaging over the long term.
It is easy to fall into because its motivations always seem fine, and it often shows fairly good results near the beginning.
If you don’t want to fall into the “Well intentioned” trap of being a Tiger parent, then don’t be a stickler about success.
The type of success your child experiences is not predictable and the results can take decades to manifest.
What you are doing right now with your child may not have a direct result on their grades but may do something as small as make your child less afraid to answer questions in class.
Twenty years down the line, your child may be the only one in the boardroom who speaks up during merger meetings and ends up saving the company.
The fact is that you don’t get much time with your kids before they are all grown up and doing their own thing.
What you do with your child may have very obvious results with regards to their success, or it may have a knock-on effect that you cannot possibly predict, such as how your child may spend time with their own kids and end up raising a president as a result.
Just remember that the time you spend with your kids is precious because there is so little of it, so try to make the whole experience positive, not just the end result.
