As a parent, it's no fun to be the homework-police. But as the school year progresses, you may find yourself in a daily dance of, "Do your reading." "Time for your reading now." "Because you have to do your homework!!" Depending on your dynamic around setting limits, this can turn into an epic battle of wills, or another night where your child ends up doing less than you think they should.
How can you encourage your child's internal motivation? The trick is to build a cycle of growing capability and positive reinforcement. Read on for more.
Sometimes observers of human behavior make the mistake of believing that, given the chance, we would always choose short-term pleasure and rewards. These people think that working hard and delaying gratification for a future goal must be motivated with reward and punishment. But this view neglects the fact that humans, and children especially, have an inherent drive toward capability. In fact, capability (along with connection and autonomy) is one of the fundamental drivers of human behavior.
What this means is that kids will be inherently motivated to work toward growth and improvement, as long as you can create a reasonably encouraging environment for it. To be encouraged, kids need:
tasks at the 'challenging but do-able' level, where they have to stretch but ultimately can succeed
a warm and attuned adult interested in their work and progress
not to be shamed for failures, or scared about what poor results will mean
If a child is very resistant to working on a particular subject or other aspect of school, it's likely that they have had one too many discouraging experiences, where the challenge was either too high or too low, they were scolded or shamed or otherwise unsupported, and they have developed a fear of repeating those experiences.
One further note, however, on the common practice of offering rewards for desired behavior, such as school attendance or getting good grades. Unfortunately large amounts of research has shown that rewards do not work to build motivation for a task. In fact, they are counter productive. Study after study has shown that people become *less* motivated to do something after receiving a reward or incentive than they were before. This applies to attendance, school work, acts of kindness... all the things that we want to encourage! When kids (and all people) receive rewards, they seem to conclude that they were doing the thing for the reward, and lose inherent motivation to do it. Paying for grades, giving treats for kind behavior, and even praise for eating vegetables, all serve to dis-incentivize the very behavior that we want!
Read on below for best ways to help your child through.
