Motivates Your Child and Stop Procrastination
You have tried every conceivable tricks you know to motivate your child to focus on his (or her) studies, from reasoning to bribery to threats and punishments but nothing works.
Well, you are not alone. Below are some common parents’ complaints about their children’s study habits:
Dangers of Procrastination and Lack of Motivation
Lacking in motivation and procrastination are two sides of the same coin. They feed on one another, creating an ever-strengthening vicious cycle.
Experts warn that lacking in motivation and procrastination in the academic realm is getting increasingly prevalent. If your child engages in such detrimental practice, he or she faces many negative consequences including lost time, increased stress, lower grades, poorer health, decreased long-term learning and lower self-esteem.
Factors Engendering Procrastination and the Lack of Motivation
Parents often simplistically attribute procrastination and lack of motivation to mere laziness. However, the truth is far more complex and cynical. It’s imperative to realize that several grave factors may collude to foster such debilitating character traits in your child. Some of these factors are:
- Not knowing how to cope with stress.
- Anxiety.
- Being bullied.
- Learning disability (also known as Dyslexia).
- Unconducive learning environment (E.g. noise, distractions, ambient temperature).
- Lacking restful sleep (E.g. nightmares, enuresis/bed-wetting, sleep apnea).
- Low Self-Esteem or Self-Confidence.
- Lack of focus and concentration.
- Poor organizational skills.
- Fear of failure or complexity of task.
- Perfectionism.
- Excessive after-school activities.
Parents should also note that extensive research over the past few decades has revealed procrastination is a far more psychologically significant condition with complex causes and serious implications than was once thought. Procrastination has also been identified as a common symptom of a more significant underlying psychological disorder.
Tips that can Help Kids Stay Interested in Academics
- Praise your children’s effort rather than intelligence and/or performance. This encourages them to embrace challenges and helps to cultivate a growth mindset.
- Demonstrate and encourage your child to make connections between schoolwork and real life. For instance, if your son enjoys skateboarding, show him the physics behind mid-air maneuvers and tricks. If your daughter aspires to be a fashion designer, show her the importance of mathematics in taking measurements and figuring proportions.
- Be a role model to your child. Show your child your enthusiasm in learning and applying new skills.
- Ever heard of the phrase “Never bite off more than you can chew”? This applies to goals too. Always break big goals into sub-goals; long-term goals into multiple short-term goals.
When to Seek Professional Advice
Just as smart planning is an important skill to inculcate in your child, as a prudent parent, you will do well to seek professional assistance early, before schoolwork is drastically affected or behavior becomes unwieldy.
If you have tried but was unable to rectify your child’s procrastination, be mindful that in some cases, rancorous parent-child relationship and its associated emotional baggage could sabotage your attempts to make fruitful change and further alienate the kinship.
In any case, a professionally trained counsellor, by way of scientifically-proven, empirically-supported therapeutic techniques would have more success in inspiring positive changes.
Similar to many life crisis, further delay in seeking professional advice would only create unnecessary stress, anxiety, and frustration for you and your child.
