I’ve learned a lot about kids during my years in education. For starters, they come in all sorts of packages. You have the quiet ones, the loud ones, the focused ones, the scatter-brained ones. You even get a sprinkling of the ones who aren’t really sure which universe they exist in. It all makes for a fun and exciting school day. I say that in all sincerity. If there was one thing I would remove from school today if I knew it wouldn’t affect the outcome is the pressure to succeed. I am almost convinced the school accountability movement that sprang up as a reaction to societal issues has morphed into a tyranny of testing.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am for assessing and learning. I want kids to learn, to really grasp a truth so tightly that it alters their being; but the pressures that come from making sure children achieve that razor’s edge of knowledge has led to some unintended outcomes. One notable one is a dissatisfaction when our children come home with anything less than an “A” on their assignments. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the testing scandal that happened a few years ago. You probably remember the parents who got caught and then went to jail…all because they knew their children weren’t up to the standards of the schools they wanted the kids to go to, and they cheated to get those kids into school. I wonder what those poor kids thought knowing they were not the students their parents made them out to be, and how it affected them in their inner thoughts.
Which takes us back to our topic. We all want our children to succeed. We want them to have the notoriety, the accolades, the credibility of being a top student. I have lost count of the times I sat through a parent interview and been assured that the five year old drawing outside the lines in front of me was the next Einstein, only for those parents to see that their child was really just an average kid when the assessments came back in the first quarter. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have a hope that our child will be “the one”, but parents often put themselves and their children into a corner by setting arbitrary expectations for learning success before any verifiable data shows where a student actually stands. As the years go on, pressures mount until students get to high school and parents struggle to understand why their child is shutting down and refuses to learn, or constantly lives in a state of anxiety.
Mom, Dad, let me help you out before it gets to this point. It’s okay if your child is not jumping grades at 6 years old, or competing in the Math Olympiad as a 9 year old. Believe it or not, there are a lot of “average” people out there changing the world, and your child could change someone’s world for good one day if you do the most important thing in child rearing - training a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6). In our rush to make sure our kids have the skills for life, let’s not forget to teach them how to live. To do that, here’s some practical tips and goals for helping your child through school.
“Life is about timing and overcoming difficult things.”
GOAL #1 - Help Your Child Find God’s Will
Knowing the will of God for our life is the single greatest thing we can know. God has a plan for each of us that starts with salvation and goes from there. We are each uniquely designed to fulfill a purpose in His plan, and He has given us the skills, capacity, and temperament to complement the physical attributes needed to accomplish that purpose. Teach your child the benefit of hearing God’s voice and following His leading to the greatest blessings in life.
GOAL #2 - Develop Your Child’s Talents
It doesn’t matter how you came into the world or what your intellectual abilities are, God gave you a talent (or more). Even people who would be classified as developmentally delayed or disabled have God-given talents. Help your child realize those talents and then learn how to wield them for blessing and the glory of God.
GOAL #3 - Instill Character
Someone once said that talent without character is a horrible combination. Teach your child godly character that hones and balances the inclinations of human ego toward using talents in a biblical manner. We have several examples in Scripture of people who had talent but used it for wrong. The end results were not good. Conversely, there are those who did use talent for good, and we see the blessings that came as a result of it. Make the learning of character a constant habit. Instill it from an early age and refine it as the years progress.
GOAL #4 - Show the Blessing of Hard Work and Learning as a Process, Not a Consequence
Your child is going to come up against what I call “the Wall”. This is the point at which learning becomes exponentially harder for a student. It usually happens around 4th grade, but can occur as late as 9th grade. This is the point that kids realize that learning is becoming very hard, and the reason it happens around these milestones is because the material starts becoming more abstract. Children’s brains are not quite engaged in the abstract reasoning process in the latter elementary years, so concepts that don’t have concrete physical representations really become mindbreakers. It’s frustrating for a child, but it’s even more frustrating for a parent who has forgotten what that stage of life felt like. instead of getting frustrated when your child comes home with a mound of homework and “just doesn’t get it”, sit down and talk through the problems. Let your child know that learning is a process that involves struggle and failure. If failure can be internalized as a stepping stone to greater success, it leads to more confident and successful kids who turn into the same as adults. This is why I love science. There is no right or wrong, only valid and invalid. If we find that we have arrived at a bad conclusion, we back the process up and go a different direction until we find the truth. Whenever your child comes home and work is a struggle, remind him or her that it’s ok to work and strain, but it is never ok to quit.
Setting a good precedent early is a life changing experience for a child. Our own experience at SBA, and the data, shows that creating a hard-working, initiative driven mindset with these goals in mind creates a lifelong learner who embraces those things put before him. I would encourage you to start wherever you are with your child and develop a wholesome mindset toward learning with these four goals and tips. You never know what genius you might actually unleash.
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”