Doing Their Best: Encouraging Children to Earn Good Grades

---

Explore Everyday Health

A few things to remember are:. Each family has to decide what works best for them with reward systems. Your decisions may be different than your neighbors and others in your extended family. Taking time to think through how you want to handle this area will be important in the event that questions from your child or others arise. Start Here For Parents. Child Care, Preschool, and Education Programs Learn about our programs and curriculum for infants through school age.

Help employees balance work, life, family and finances through every stage of their lives. Employer-Sponsored Early Education Learn about our child care and back-up care solutions for employees. Work at Bright Horizons Find career opportunities, search and apply. We should always hold high but realistic expectations for our children.

Encouraging Kids to Get Good Grades | Bright Horizons®

Let your kids know that you think they are smart and capable and provide assistance as needed with homework and projects. But don't go overboard with your expectations. Having high expectations is important, but having too high expectations can put unnecessary pressure on your child and that is not usually helpful.

Creating homework space and offering help is a good thing. Sometimes all that is needed with homework help is to listen while your child thinks through a project. Showing your interest in and of itself is helpful. You can also ask open-ended questions like "What do you think? Asking open-ended questions works even after the content of your child's homework exceeds what you remember from school. There has been a lot of discussion recently about praise vs. Praise "good job" and "well done" is less helpful than descriptive phrases that offer encouragement "These last few months you have been really consistent about doing your homework each night and it shows in these good grades.

Specific encouragement as part of positive parenting is helpful because you are telling your child exactly what he did that was beneficial.

He is more likely to remember your specific encouragement than a generic "good job. Most of us want our children to be intrinsically motivated - in other words, we want our children to want to earn good grades and to work without verbal recognition or tangible rewards. By the time they start school, many children are intrinsically motivated and our job is to help them maintain this quality.

A powerful way to encourage a child's motivation is for parents to model working towards a goal, whether it be cleaning the kitchen or completing a challenging project at work.

Latest Articles

If a child is intrinsically motivated and he or she is offered tangible rewards for good grades, that child will likely come to rely on the rewards and may, in the future, only get good grades if a reward is present. So rewards are not needed if your child is intrinsically motivated and may even have a negative outcome.

However, if you are already offering rewards or are trying to build your child's motivation, here are a few things to consider: You might try saying that this reward is only for this one time so that you don't set a precedent for all good grades in the future. Your child may still say, "but last time, I got Discuss why the problem occurred and problem-solve, as a team, how to prevent low scores in the future. Your child may come to a point where a tutor can make the difference.

A tutor may simply teach your child to study properly, comprehend on a higher level or write more effectively. Follow through on rewards immediately.

Three tips to remember at report card time

Be ready to follow through as soon as possible. What about… …using money as an incentive?

There are mixed reviews on this strategy. It works well for some children, but not every child will respond.

8 Strategies For Encouraging Good Grades

How you present the reward makes a world of difference. Another concern is that some children start to believe that they should be paid for doing everything.

Communicating with your child from early on should give you an idea of what he values. Healthy children have interests and desires that allow room for positive reinforcement of some sort. Most children go through some period of struggling in school.

Are your children happy with their school? Are they reaching their full potential?

12 Strategies to Motivate Your Child to Learn

Are they learning what you believe they should be learning? Whether you need a school for gifted children or are considering home schooling your child, be aware that there are many different school types beyond the traditional choices of public and private. Take this brief quiz and find out which school type is right for your child.

Sign up for our Healthy Living Newsletter!

Thanks for signing up for our newsletter! You should see it in your inbox very soon.

• The Weathermakers (Rebelutionaries Series Book 1)
• Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression (Critical Studies in Television)
• Prime Target
• Your Intelligent Immune System
• Whats wrong with the church in America: Is the church being effective today?
• Bouncers and Bodyguards: Tales from a Twilight World