‘My teenage children are bright but unmotivated. How much should I get involved with their school work?’
I have teenagers of 12 and 14 and am struggling to work out how involved I should be with their school work. They are bright and I clearly want them to succeed in what they choose to do, but they are also fairly unmotivated and, probably like many teenagers, don’t put their all into their school work.
Friends have different perspectives but it sounds like a lot of people are arranging tutoring for their children. I’m not sure mine would enjoy this on top of school and homework but am I holding them back by not supporting them with this? Does there come a point when you just need to sit back a little and let them take ownership of their decisions and behaviour, or is this still too young? I’m sure every child is different and every parent is different too.
Eleanor says: It sounds like you’re coming from a genuine place of wanting to support your kids, so let me ask a slightly frustrating question: why is excelling at school meant to be valuable for them at this stage? Is it to keep their future career choices as open as possible? Is it about learning about how to think? Is it the only way they can achieve some goal they’ve set their hearts set on?
I think a clear picture of why school is valuable for them is going to be key here. Otherwise, sinking your resources and their time into tutoring or after-hours work risks just feeling like optimising for optimising’s sake. If that’s the name of the game, we might as well dial in their athletic training and mindfulness practice too, but of course you’re not going to do that because your kids aren’t Sims and you’re not trying to just maximise their skills along all dimensions instead of letting them just be kids.
So: why care about school?
For me it kind of turned out to be a way of life. There was a freedom involved in thinking that I couldn’t get anywhere else and that I wanted to develop forever and ever. If your kids also have that kind of hankering, exposing them to more learning and study could shape their whole lives. Great texts and one-on-one education can really wake up a certain kind of kid.
But that isn’t the only kind of “waking up”. Kids have all kinds of little lights in them. Some of them become themselves by figuring out their values. Some of them become themselves by learning an art they can’t stop making, or by having enough free time away from authority that they learn to see through their own eyes, or just by trying things for themselves. “Find what you want to do and do more of it,” my dad used to say on the way home from whatever weird thing I was doing that month. This stuff is about sensibility, and you don’t get sensibility through grades.
Beyond the baseline of “performing well enough to keep your options open”, I think how much to involve yourself in schoolwork when they’re this young depends entirely on why school might matter.
That’s something you could get their input on. “What would you like to do in your future?” doesn’t need to feel like “My parent is forcing me to do X”. It can also be “What excites you? What do you most want? How can we help you go after it?”. The point of those conversations wouldn’t be to push them towards a particular conception of what life should look like. It’d be to help start thinking with boldness and them-ness about what life their grown-up self might want.
I’m no pedagogical expert but my feeling is the costs of slightly phoning in your schoolwork are pretty slim at 12 to 14. What this might be instead is a chance to get them thinking about the kind of future they want given everything special and strange about them, and how you can help make that future real.
This letter has been edited for clarity.
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