We’ve all been through it. In our formative years, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for parents to punish poor grades and withhold privileges if academic achievements fell short. Times change, and you’re likely working hard to leave behind some habits you picked up from your parents.
The trick is to adapt and learn to give your children a balanced and proactive upbringing.
How Academic Pressure Affects Children
While our parents may have done their best with the tools they had, they also carried forward disciplinary lessons learned from their parents before them — especially regarding childhood education. Like music, sustainability initiatives and society in general, parenting methods have changed through enhanced knowledge and informational levels.
Coping with overwhelming academic pressure is only a part of your child’s reality in today’s world, and it’s not a small task. Excessive academic pressure involves the demands and stress their education generates in them. The anxiety of dealing with the self-expectation and other expectations placed on them can cause detrimental side effects like sleeping difficulties, appetite changes, abandonment of social circles and an excessive work ethic, among others.
While you shouldn’t eliminate academic pressure in your child’s life, you can help balance their expectations by aligning your own and avoiding overbearing or unrealistic expectations. Proactively alleviating these pressures will encourage your child without making them feel unworthy if they fall short.
How to Encourage Your Children at School
The sooner you implement practices to reduce your child’s pressures, the better. Academic pressure grows as your kid ages, so instilling habits and methods that alleviate these early on helps them develop coping mechanisms they’ll rely on through the years.
As a parent, getting positively involved in your child’s academic endeavors can build your relationship as their realization of your support grows. Your kids will trust and value your input more as they get older. Think about helping in the following ways:
Assess Academic Abilities
From an early school-going age, children go through scores of evaluations and testing, culminating in graded assessments that provide the framework for academic achievement.
Track your child’s progress and set targets accordingly. Remember, your child will require specific skills to succeed as an adult, so emphasize growing their social and interpersonal skills alongside their primary academic ones.
Set Up Study Times and Routines
Encourage your child to study within designated times using proactive routines. Doing so creates a healthy study-life balance similar to the one you practice with work and family. You’ll reduce their chances of overstudying, which can lead to burnout and likely diminish your child’s hard work over time.
Overstudying reduces study efficacy and affects your child’s personal and social playtime. Extreme studying without results can affect your child’s confidence levels and potentially cause unhealthy habits of seeking approval from you, teachers and peers. If your child starts identifying their studies as a means of being perfect, it may even result in OCD-related “studyholism.”
If your child doesn’t study enough, it can result in them eventually giving up, so go work together to find the right study routines. Create a fun and lighthearted experience by treating their studies as a benefit, not a chore.
Encourage and Incentivize
Encourage your child’s study efforts by spending time with them after sessions. Perhaps throw a ball outside during a study period to review facts and improve study methods.
Time doing fun things after sessions provides positive incentives to maintain their hard work. Shy away from offering rewards for achievements — instead, show appreciation with a surprise trip to the ballgame after an excellent result.
Maintain Discipline Without Pressure
Disciplining your child with explanations means they’ll easily understand the reasons. Coordinate their study routines until they’re responsible enough to do so themselves, and apply discipline until they are. Support and encourage their academic efforts to promote growth, as punishments could disrupt your child’s future efforts.
Let your child create their own healthy academic pressure, and monitor it — don’t add to it.
Jack Shaw is the senior lifestyle writer at Modded with and a single father with a special interest in navigating the ins and outs of being a parent. As fathers, the work we put in isn’t always recognized, but it’s absolutely essential to the health and well-being of our children. You can find more of Jack’s work in publications like Tiny Buddha, Daddy’s Digest, Parent.com and more. Contact him via LinkedIn.
