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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DD is 12, has inattentive ADHD and is dyslexic. She's pretty bright -- IQ tests given at different times have had varied results but seem to suggest she is somewhere between 75th and 95th percentile on FSIQ.  She's at a small private school and says she loves school -- she goes off happily every day-- but she seems to have no particular interest in her grades: that is, she feels a little bad if she gets a D, but seems to feel just fine about Cs and Bs. She mostly gets Bs (school has plenty of grade inflation). She'll do her homework but very minimally; if the teacher says to spend 30 minutes on something she'll do 30 minutes and stop, regardless of whether she is mid-problem. She never wants to do extra credit problems, and for tests, she'll "study" for many half and hour then declare that she's all done studying.

Should I worry about her apparent lack of motivation? Or conclude that if she's doing fine she's doing fine, and not every kid has to feel strong inner motivation about school success? Or conclude that it could be an issue, but she's only in sixth grade and that motivation may come in the future? I don't know whether to just leave her be or push her a bit harder....[/quote]

I think ALL students need explicit help from parents to understand why grades are important and how to get good grades.  It is actually the rare student who gets straight As on their own, and IMO, a big part of being that naturally straight A student is being able to understand the implicitly conveyed messages in class about what is expected, how to study and what is considered "good".

This is even more true for kids with LDs or ADD.  Here I don't think "lack of motivation" is the primary problem -- in fact that's the major stigma of having one of these disabilities/disorders.  People think you are "unmotivated" or "lazy" when most of the time the student is really not able to understand how to effectively learn and compensate under the disability.   In fact, from the point of view of an LD or ADD kid, it's really a rational and psychologically protective decision to be "unmotivated".  I mean, would YOU keep knocking yourself out at work if your boss kept saying that everything you worked really hard on was crap?  If you did the things that your boss asked and that your peers did to get "good grades" and you still performed poorly.  In fact, if it seemed like you always got a poor performance whether you worked hard or not, wouldn't YOU stop working so hard?  Would you maybe come to believe that you were stupid or that the boss just didn't like you?

The trick is to help your child see how they need to study/organize themselves DIFFERENTLY from the way many of their peers due, and to show them along the way that the RIGHT KIND of effort and the RIGHT KIND of accommodations can improve their output (grades, homework, whatever).  For example, my ADD child needs a very specific routine w/ reference to recording, doing and turning in homework.  The parent, teacher and child must be participants in the routine every day and the parents and teachers must be positive (not negative) enforcers.  On the parent side, obviously, I check the planner every day, point out when things are incorrectly recorded, direct the child to the homework space and help set time limits appropriate for ADD, check the completed homework and give prompts for editing (i.e. you have 3 errors on this page), and provide positive reinforcement when things are well done even if not perfectly done.  The teacher must be the partner in the classroom providing prompts to record, organize and turn in things and praising effort/improvement.

Some of this is also what you choose to convey to your child, depending on what you think her capabilities and limits are.  In our house, Cs and Ds are never acceptable, given what we know about the kids IQ/ability. (BTW, straight As are neither required and improvement is as valued as an A.)  That said, a C or D is not cause for punishment either, but it is reason to end a "laissez-faire" approach.  In our house if you meet household grade expectations, then I as a parent will basically let you handle your homework/studying on your own.  But, if you are getting Cs and Ds, I am going to review planner, review homework nightly, ask to see test grades and ask to review the completed test with my child if the test grade is bad.  Again, not as punishment, but in an effort to find out what kinds of mistakes are being made and what is needed to do better.  Maybe a child with ADD needs an extra-time accommodation or needs to develop personal academic habits to avoid kinds of classic ADD errors (reversals, careless reading of Q, sloppy computation, etc.).  Or maybe the child really didn't understand a particular unit and needs to be retaught or needs more supervision of homework so that lack of understanding can be caught earlier.  Or maybe the bad grade is due to the fact that the teacher made a mistake (kid you not, one year a teacher taught an entire unit of math incorrectly and had many incorrect answers on the exam -- no wonder my child "lacked motivation" and "didn't understand"!  Many kids need you to go thru the homework and test review and problem solving process with them, and schools definitely aren't doing close personal assessment of errors and needed adjustments.

We try to provide non-monetary rewards for good grades, grade or performance improvement or really good effort, because we know that the teacher doesn't really have time to do a lot of positive motivation in the classroom beyond grading the paper.  We do special restaurant dinners (kid chooses place, big toast is made at beginning), presents that have to do with projects/improvements (cool shark t-shirt after really good shark report was written), or whatever seems appropriate.

I have seen that, over time, kinds internalize the message that grades are important and that they are smart enough to get good grades and that they now know how to get good grades.  Over time they also internalize that perfection is not the goal, which is just as important, IMO.

Get a tutor who specializes in LD or ADD to help if you can't.  Sometimes it's helpful to have a tutor to take the parent/child dependence/independence struggle out of the school equation.  Also, when a tutor says, "your smart, you can do this," that's often what a child hears.  When a parent says, "your smart, you can do this," a child often thinks "you have to say that" or hears "why are you screwing up". [/quote]

As one of the PP's who posted, I'm happy that this works in your family.  It can be much tougher going for many of us with kids with LDs and ADHD.  We value the effort more than the grades but in our experience, a lot of these deficits can be hard to remediate.  Despite generally good, involved teachers, tutoring, and our working with DS.  We're professionals who went to good schools and have good jobs.  We talk about the importance of good grades etc but for a lot of kids -- most definitely those with ADHD and LDs, -- that ability to self-regulate and plan ahead (in this case for what seems like a quite distant future) is really limited.  DS sometimes has homework that isn't due till the end of the week - his immediate reaction is that he doesn't need to start it the day it's assigned.  Teaching him that he needs to plan ahead and also take into account additional work that might be assigned in the interim is an uphill struggle.

Moreover, there is never time to reinforce/drill/do additional work/review (except for the immediate test at hand).  He struggles enough with homework as it is.  He needs - and deserves - some down time.  I worry a lot -- especially in this hyper-competitive area.[/quote]

I am PP you quote.  I agree entirely with what you said.  There are times when I provide much more structure, and times when that structure isn't necessary.   For long term projects, sometimes it can be part of the IEP that the projects are broken down by the teacher and provided in steps to the student if they aren't yet capable of long term planning.  For some kids, it's not a reasonable expectation that they will be able to internalize this for themselves for a very long time if ever, but they can still be taken through the step-wise process.  And, yes, it can be hard to get them to make long term connections between doing homework and getting some abstract end result like good grades or good opportunities in life.  But, it's not as hard for them to see the short term immediate daily connections -- "if I want to play xbox, I have to spend 20 minutes doing this concrete task.

I also agree that the amount of work can be overwhelming.  That's why it's important to discuss ways to limit the work -- cutting the number of problems to be done or questions to be answered, strictly enforcing reasonable maximum time limits on homework, making some homework oral answer instead of written answer, introducing accommodations like extra time, calculator use, computer use, assistive spellers, scribe, using texts on tape, whatever.

For my LD and ADD child, it has been very difficult to change the motivational outlook.  This is our 3rd year working on it, but there is visible progress.  Consistent school/parent partnership is critical, and it is really about thinking differently about what skills are important to demonstrate, how skills mastery is demonstrated in a way that is reasonable given the LD and ADD, and emphasizing alternate successful learning methods.   For my dysgraphic child who has difficulty with a pencil -- why does he have to draw a picture to go with an answer?  why can't he just print out a picture of what he wants to show or orally describe a scene?  Drawing a picture is unbearably time consuming in homework or testing and completely not critical to learning.  By MS he will have to be one of the students who gets a 2-3 page "paper" broken down into individual components w/ deadlines -- pick topic, write topic sentence, think of three supporting ideas, etc.  [/quote]

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