Help Your Teen Achieve Their Potential

Nagging is the worst way to encourage your child to achieve at school. Our experts offer other strategies.

- Anna Maxted

TEENAGERS THESE DAYS seem to be subject to a relentless barrage of tests and exams. The stress is acute, and not just for the children. The last thing parents want is to exacerbate the problem with catastrophe-invoking warnings of a life in ruins if they don’t knuckle down. Yet my son’s attitude is occasionally laid-back to the point of being horizontal. So how do we motivate our high-school-age children to fulfil their potential, without damaging their wellbeing?

Let them organise their own schedule

Ideally, we will have instilled regular work routines in our children by the time they hit high-school age, meaning that good habits are ‘fairly automatic and normalised’, says Professor Joe Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University in the UK. Waiting until their teenage years before cracking the whip will lead to power struggles. Win the war by conceding control over timing.

‘Give the child a choice,’ says Elliott. Do we start homework at six, or half-past five? The deal is, it happens when they say.’ Read their homework diary, he advises, so you can’t be fobbed off about what needs doing.

Help them to discover their talents

Try to do this ‘without it being artificial’, says educationist Dr Joseph Spence. ‘Find ways in which children can be rewarded. Children are motivated when they know there’s something they’re good at.’ It’s essential for teenagers to believe that their parents have faith in them.