We all want our children to succeed. In an increasingly competitive world filled with distractions, it’s natural to want to make sure we’re giving our children the best opportunities at school and beyond.
Every child is unique, and at our private school in Devon, we work to ensure everyone gets the best possible environment for academic success. However, achievements at school often start at home, and as parents, there’s a lot we can do to ensure they’re ready to learn.
Whether your child is stuck with a tricky subject or you want to make the most of their strengths, here are some of the best ways you can help them set the right foundations for success in academia and later life.
1. Set Realistic Goals
First, it helps to understand what ‘academic performance’ means for you and your child. This process starts with open dialogue between you both – and sometimes also teachers – to create realistic goals.
All children are unique; they develop at different speeds and have strengths, weaknesses and passions that suit certain subjects over others. Therefore, it’s crucial to avoid setting blanket goals across multiple subjects or set goals based on the performance of peers.
Instead, understand your child’s abilities and set stepping-stone objectives that feel achievable with a good amount of effort.
2. Create a Study Routine
Improving academic success often means creating more time for revision, homework, and similar tasks. The best way to do this is to create a consistent study routine – a time in the day or week that is dedicated to learning.
Routines are a crucial part of our everyday lives, providing comfort and reassurance when we go about our day. Creating a study routine helps to make the process of extra studying feel normal, comforting and enjoyable over time.
To help a routine stick, ensure your child is involved in the process. Let them organise their study time around their subjects so they can learn to take responsibility and grow their organisational skills.
3. Link Academia and Play
As many of these points discuss, the more enjoyable we can make academia, the more likely children are to learn and succeed. While there is a time and place for traditional studies, wherever possible, we should try to make learning fun.
For younger children, basic play, especially outdoors like at the park or beach is great for developing motor skills, creativity, imagination and more. For older children, small things like incorporating language studies into word games like Scrabble or Hangman can be really useful for reinforcing regular studies.
4. Lean on Their Passions
When trying to boost performance, it can be tempting to focus solely on the things we need to improve. However, better results can be achieved by also making room for our strengths to flourish.
If your child is gifted in some areas but struggles in others, talk to them to understand what it is that makes them enjoy their best subjects so much. Set goals to continue improving on these and also see if you can take any of the passion from their strengths and share it with their weaker areas.
For example, if your child loves competitive sports but struggles with maths, see if you can turn math studies into a competition or incorporate sporting elements into their learning. Doing so could help your child funnel their passions into subjects that need more support.
5. Encourage with Honesty
How we communicate with our children is really important and will have a tangible effect on their motivation for extra studies.
Try to be honest and have an open dialogue about areas where you’d like your child to improve. Instead of giving directives (e.g. “I’d like you to improve on your science tests”), communicate in a way that allows them to discuss and take ownership (e.g. “I noticed you struggle with science, do you know why that might be?”).
It’s important to celebrate the process of improvement as much as the results. Praise your child for sticking to their study routine, for example.
However, try to avoid giving false praise, such as telling your child they’re a genius after a small improvement. It’s natural to want to give your child self-confidence, but if the praise they get at home is disconnected from the reality of their results and school life, this can lead to demotivation long-term.
6. Be Accepting of Failure
It can sound counter-intuitive when looking at how to improve your child’s academic performance, but the reality is that failure is an unavoidable part of the road to success.
It’s important that children foster a positive attitude towards failure. Help them understand that to be good at anything, you have to start by being bad. It can help to share some of your own stories of when you were bad at something you now do well, whether from your own school life or elsewhere.
There may be some failures – such as skipping home study – that you feel need to be addressed more strictly. In these situations, always try to emphasise consequences over artificial punishments, such as taking away screens. The more children are made to feel the real-world consequences of their actions, the more likely they are to amend their behaviours in future.
7. Look After Their Health
The impact of physical health on studying can’t be underestimated. From improved mood to increased concentration, the benefits of exercise and activity for young minds can affect academic performance.
As we make sure there is space for homework, also ensure there’s plenty of space for outdoor activities. Try to encourage variety as much as possible – walking to school, cycling on weekends, climbing clubs during the week etc. – to give your child a range of experiences.
Exercise doesn’t just keep our brains firing, but it also creates natural gaps between study sessions which can help new information to embed itself in our minds.
Managing the amount of screen time children have can naturally lead to more activity. Children are incredibly creative and will find new and exciting ways to engage themselves when screens are not available.
Sleep is another key aspect of our health that impacts our ability to study, so ensure your child gets plenty of rest that allows them to recover and feel fresh before their days at school.
8. Lead by Example
One of the key aspects of parenting is leading by example. Children look to parents and carers as role models, so if we want children to improve an aspect of their lives, it helps if we’re trying to improve it, too.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you need to dust off your old algebra books. Simply following the techniques above in our own lives – setting goals, sticking to a routine and being honest about our shortcomings – can help children see the benefits of doing the same things for themselves.
Again, open and honest conversation is key. Just as you would want your kid to talk about stuff they’re struggling with, try to share your ambitions and struggles, from the past or the present, and discuss how you hope to overcome them. It could be something big – such as saving for a new house – or something small – such as trying to improve at a hobby.
Hopefully, there are some ideas here that can help you encourage your child to even greater academic heights!