A Proven Way to Make Underperformers Do Much Better

Author: Ian Lee / Source: Lifehack

You know your child is smart. She exhibits intelligence every day, and family friends have remarked about how bright she is. But when report card day comes it’s like someone is evaluating a different child. What happened on the way to school? Did she travel into an alternate universe?

At first as the bad grades start to emerge, you think your child will pull out of it. You just need to help her with the homework, help her understand the concepts better. Yet your attempts to help are like banging your head against a wall. The will to perform is just not there.

You’re not alone. Plenty of children and teens are underperformers. Child psychologist Dr. Sylvia Rimm ¹says, “Underlying these children’s poor study habits, weak skills, disorganization, and defensiveness is a feeling of a lack of personal control over their educational success.” Some kids just don’t feel personally invested in getting good grades.

This is becoming a real problem because your child isn’t learning what it means to work hard and succeed at something. School is “boring,” the teachers “suck,” the other kids are “jerks.” You’re pulling teeth just to get her to finish and turn in assignments, and when test time comes, it seems like she’s tanking on purpose.

If your child doesn’t learn how to perform up to her potential in school, how will she be able fulfill that potential in real life?

The key is to connect your child’s educational goals to her life through strategy, affirmation, and rewards.

Introduce Values-Based Self-Affirmation

Stress is a huge factor for kids in school.

You can remember what it’s like, but there’s nothing quite like being there. Values-based self-affirmation ²is a proven method of confronting stress and empowering your child to cope with it positively.

In multiple studies, African-American and Latino American students thought about and wrote about what was most important to them. These students face a lot of stress due to their minority status, and it causes them to underperform. They wrote about their values at critical times of stress during the school year—at the outset, before tests, and around holidays.

The students saw a 30 percent improvement in performance, and their grade-point averages were much higher than students who didn’t do values-affirmation assignments. This also worked for female college students in physics.

Brain scans ³ show that self-affirmation increases activity in the self-related and reward-related areas of the brain. Values affirmation also reduces cortisol response ⁴in students, effectively lowering stress levels and heart rate.

Sit down with your child when she’s feeling stressed out about school and ask her to write about what she values—her relationships, her interests, her passions. Ask her to write a little bit about how her values relate to her future. Do the exercise with her, and keep it up as the school year continues.