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| My children doing their work |
Scenario: You have a kid. He plays the iPad and watches cartoons all day. When you ask him to do his homework, he gives you a disgusted look and procrastinates. Five minutes later, you ask him again and he procrastinates again. You nag and nag until he complies. He does his work quickly (with a lot of careless mistakes) and goes back to his iPad or cartoons.
Question: How motivated is this child?
Answer: This child is super motivated, not in doing the homework of course, but in playing iPad and watching the cartoons.
You have to understand that the child's actions were totally logical to him. His choices were made without restrictions or consequences. No matter what he chooses, life still gets on.
Imagine if you have a choice between work and play. No matter which choice you make, your salary will still be paid into your bank account.
Very few normal people will choose work.
I work, there will be money. I play, there will be money too. Why should I choose work?
These are the thought processes in your child's head when he chooses iPad and cartoons.
If your child is exactly what I have described above, you have a very serious problem at hand. The nearer your child is to PSLE, the more urgent the problem.
There are 3 steps that I implement in my tuition to break this mindset and motivate the child in the right things. It is a mixture of methods I learned from various books.
1. Vision Casting to give an overall goal
2. Small Steps to provide a pathway to the overall goal
3. Visual Feedback to provide a view on the current status
1. Vision Casting
The question to ask your child is "Why do you think you need to learn?"
You will be surprised that most of the kids will answer that it is because their parents asked them to. The child has no ownership to learning at all. They are just doing what they are being told to do.
This is the most crucial step and builds the driver for motivation. This is the 'why' in the things that the child does.
- Why did you choose to play iPad?
- Why did you choose to do the worksheets?
It is important to guide the child to give the right answer and not just provide model answer to him. (If not, he is still doing what you tell him to do.)
I use mainly the Socratic Method of asking questions at this point. (The 'why' in the 'why'.) Some questions include:
- Why is playing the iPad enjoyable?
- How is homework different from this enjoyment?
- Why is it that you don't enjoy doing homework?
- Is there a way to make homework enjoyable to you?
- How can we make this better for both of us?
- Why do you avoid hard work?
- Why do you think it is important to have hard work?
- Tell me a story about hard work.
- What will happen if we avoid hard work constantly?
The list goes on and it is really dependent on the child's answer to each question. It can take quite a long time to go through this. I have to emphasise that this is a very important step and it provides the very foundation of the motivation driver. Spend as much time as you need and it should be reinforced from time to time.
2. Very Small Steps
After vision casting, the child will not be magically transformed into a motivated learner. You will need to help the child in the transformation.
In my tuition class, it takes about 6 to 9 months before any results are seen. Some children take longer.
Fix a timing for work. Agree on the timing and get your child's commitment to put in maximum effort during that time slot.
For example, both of you agree that the timing is 7pm. Start in very small time slots. Say five minutes. Before starting, remind your child that he has promised to put in maximum effort during this five minutes.
Praise your child on his effort for focusing. Reflect it in the time chart.
After a week, increase to ten minutes and after a month, increase to twenty minutes. Soon you will have your child doing his work in thirty-minute slots.
But, you have to remember to start very very small. If your child is overwhelmed and give up at this point, all will be lost.
3. Make It Visual
This is very useful because it is a constant reminder that the child's decision has a direct impact on his future.
Set up a big time chart and paste it somewhere where the child will see everyday. It might look something like that:
Set it at 10-minute interval. Track his time spent on various activities for a week. Then, transfer this to a journal after each week. Entries might look something like:
----------------------------------------------------------------
18 to 24 August
Time spent on iPad = 7 hours
Time spent on learning = 1 hour
Time spent on playing toys = 5 hours
Time spent on cartoons = 7 hours
----------------------------------------------------------------
Match this to his exam results and illustrate to him that the amount of time put into his learning directly impacts his results. And his results impact his future.
(At around this point, I would usually spend some time telling stories on the effective use of time.)
Some of the parents might think that this is too much hard work. However, don't you think the effort is totally worth it when your child is motivated on the right stuff?
Some of my friends commented that I am very lucky that my kids are all very self-motivated and self-directed. I can only smile. Now now, what is the probability that ALL my kids are born self-motivated. Who are you kidding? This is not chance. It is all hard work.
It is so easy for children to get motivated in the wrong stuff (iPad/cartoons/games) these days and we really need to set their internal compass correct while we can. It is the least we can do as parents.
I hope this post has been helpful to you. Please click on SHARE on Facebook to share this post with your friends.
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