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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We struggled with the exact same thing. When you say The Self Driven Child wasn’t helpful, is it because you backed off and your child went ahead and floundered and failed? That, essentially, is the price and the process. You keep offering support, EF coaches, and restrict distractions like screen time, but you don’t use your own motivation to replace theirs. That’s the idea, anyway.

We did essentially follow that guidance. Smart kid with dyslexia and ADHD who simply would not do all the things he’d have to do to get good grades. Refused to go to office hours, retake tests, organize his papers, or do the bare minimum to get grown ups off his back. He graduated with a 3.0, and off he went to college.

Where…he has done really well. He almost failed one class his first semester, which would have meant losing his spot on his sports team. So he asked for help, found out for the first time that “studying” means hours, not minutes, for each exam, and he pulled himself out of the ditch. He now has a better GPA than he did in high school and he is so much happier. He isn’t going to win any academic awards or go to medical school, probably, but I really do think he’s finally got (most) of his stuff together. He had to do it on his time, and give me heartache while he did.

I know other parents of similar kids who did much more scaffolding and forcing work (you can’t force motivation, only compliance). Their kids absolutely got better grades than mine did, without question. They also seem to have made it through their Freshman years intact. But I didn’t fight with my kid, or have power struggles, or have to figure out incentives and punishments. It was a relatively happy high school experience, and after a really rough middle school experience I am grateful for that.

Good luck. These kids are not easy to parent![/quote]

I struggled a bit with the Self Driven Child but came around to it after a while. It’s not any sort of Bible of course but I think the basic lesson of letting a kid have autonomy is solid - and for our kids it involves allowing them to fail (a little) which is scary but necessary. And personally I am not the kind of parent who really can handle getting that involved in the tedium of 8th grade homework so my own laziness was something I could leverage for better or for worse. The result is that I was able to see my kid slowly and imperfectly start to get it of his own accord. I think for our kids, what we have to be attentive to is when they actually are missing a piece of information wholly - like don’t know how to play the game of doing retakes, don’t know how to access a platform, maybe lack some social skills to reach out to teachers for clarification. Then we can step in and teach the skill and explain the unspoken rules.

I think it is also important to “hold your fire” with telling your kid more actively what to do until there is something bigger to address like a bad teacher, a teaching method that isn’t working, a skill gap that needs a tutor that your kid needs to be coaxed into doing, or a class that has to be repeated.

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