DS bombed a quiz and is blaming everyone else

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Focus on the lesson learned. Commend him for caring about his grades. Put this one bad grade in perspective (it's not the end of the world). Tell him that resilience is the best thing he can learn and taking responsibility for his own actions means he needs to own his failures and learn from them but it also means his successes are his too!

This is the way. If you focus on learning -- what did he learn about himself, about what studying entails for different subjects, about his own emotional reaction to different things, and about what that emotional reaction means (he cares! That's cool!) -- then even setbacks, disappointments, and moments of embarrassment or shame can become "wins."

Long-term, this ability to give himself a beat to notice, observe, think about what it all means, and to learn takes a lot of pressure off of any one outcome...and will help him respond instead of react. Of course it won't happen right away, and you can't make it happen right now. All you can do is create the space and the conversation.

[Anonymous]

As a parent, you can force him to study. Take away privileges unless he does study. We surround them with a million distractions. But you can remove those distractions and force him to study. No phone, no internet, no TV, no Sunday night movies until priorities are completed. There should not be drama about this at his age.