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I want to talk about why children struggle with school. The best way we can help them thrive is by understanding the root cause of their struggles in the first place.
I’ve worked with a lot of different kinds of kids who were struggling in school – varied ages and stages, unique goals and personality types, learning differences, you name it.
On the surface, you’d think they were struggling for different reasons. Here are four real examples of students I’ve worked with and the different reasons their parents THOUGHT they were struggling:
…My Grade 7 daughter is convinced her English teacher hates her and no matter what she does, she will never get an A…
….My Grade 9 son doesn’t like writing and is immediately overwhelmed when he gets an essay assigned…
…My Grade 10 daughter is an athlete who trains 20 hours/per week and just doesn’t have the time to compete and win while getting As…
…My daughter got straight As in high school and has gotten bad grades so far in first year university, we cannot understand why…
So – it seemed we had a teacher issue, a writing problem, a time management issue and a transition going poorly.
Each student was showing tons of stress, frustration and even depression about school; the kids’ attitudes spanned from blaming others completely to blaming themselves entirely (neither is what we want). The parents also felt stressed, helpless and unsure of how to best help.
But it turned out – and this is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever learned – that the root cause of these students’ struggles was the EXACT SAME.
They didn’t have a system in place. Homework and studying was approached daily or weekly more or less piecemeal; the goal was to ‘just get it done’ and keeping up with each subject was like a game of Whac-A-Mole.
No wonder they were struggling in school.
Once these students had a clear, step-by-step system for doing school, not only did they get better grades but the stress and frustration about school melted away.
The “reasons” they had been struggling evaporated – it was never really about the teacher or the writing. These were just symptoms of not knowing HOW to effectively manage school.
So the first question is – do your kids have clarity on HOW to complete their school work, a process for managing their classes day to day and week to week?
