"How Do I Get My Kid to Like School?"

Autonomy-Supportive Diaries

Sep 09, 2024

I’m re-sharing this post from last year because we can never hear this messaging too much in our current parenting culture: we need to back off, stop pressuring our kids, and use autonomy-supportive strategies if we want them to feel good about and do well in school. There’s one magic word to remember: motivation.

When your tween says “I’m so glad you’re my parent” it sticks with you. In a rare moment of gratitude for having me as a mom, my daughter had been telling me about all the kids at her middle school who complain about how upset their parents get when their children get lower than an A. My daughter elaborated, “I’m glad you’re a therapist who’s my mom.” I think this implied that I understood the emotional impact of this grades pressure.

If you read my previous posts about school, you know I have gone through quite the internal struggle to not emphasize high achievement and “perfect” grades. As a high-achiever perfectionist myself, it feels like this focus is in my DNA. But in my work as a psychologist, I have seen the costs of this emphasis -- the most extreme being when a child believes life is no longer worth living when they under-perform in some way -- and it’s not worth it.

I often refer to two books that reinforced my conviction to back off from pressuring high achievement in my children: Michele Borba’s Thrivers and Jennifer Wallace’s Never Enough. Both share an abundance of anecdotes and scientific support for the harms of focusing on straight A’s, 99^th-percentile performance, and working towards an Ivy League admission. This harm included (but is not limited to) kids feeling disconnected from their parents, judged, and not accepted.

When our children feel this way, we aren’t nurturing their autonomy.

It’s not just on us, of course. At middle school curriculum night, another parent and I shared with the Language and Literature teacher how our kids used to like reading, and now it's a battle for them to pick up a book. The teacher sighed, “years of school basically beat it out of them.”

Motivation Matters – For Better or For Worse

The problem is not parents and schools in and of themselves, but the rampant use of external motivators for kids to participate and do well in school. The motivation science makes clear that external motivators mostly decrease internal motivation and school is full of external motivators (grades, test scores, honors placements). These metrics undoubtedly have their place in schools, but we need to figure out how to tip the scales more toward targeting internal motivation.

Why? It turns out that internally motivated kids do better in school. Yes, the science has shown that students who describe more internal motivation with school perform better academically. These kids also believe more in their skills (self-efficacy), show greater engagement and effort, a more positive attitude toward school, and stronger executive functioning.

A keen reader may conclude “well of course if a kid has more motivation, they are going to do better; these are correlational studies just showing an association.” True. But what leads to more internal motivation? Supporting autonomy!

In his book on motivation, Why We Do What We Do, motivation researcher and autonomy-supportive parenting pioneer Edward Deci summarizes decades of motivation research that establishes how supporting autonomy leads to stronger internal motivation. I also read dozens of individual studies analyzing these same concepts with consistent findings, including a 2016 meta-analysis of 36 studies finding evidence that autonomy-supportive parenting predicts positive school outcomes.

Why It’s So Hard These Days

Since we’re not getting rid of long-used external motivators like grades and test scores anytime soon, we can start tipping the scales toward internal motivation at home with how we parent. Before we get to how to do that, it’s important to acknowledge why it’s so hard.

Many of us exert pressure not because we are academic-crazed tyrants, but because of the era in which we are parenting. In Never Enough, Wallace outlines why the current cultural context makes parents more likely to put on the academic pressure, including changing economic conditions and lower college acceptance rates. Both contribute to a feeling of scarcity – that there are fewer pathways to college and financial stability in adulthood than there were when we were in high school. Add the human impulse for social comparison, which social media puts on steroids, and we are living in a major pressure cooker.

The problem: Contrary to our drive to demand high achievement to ensure our child’s success and well-being, this increased pressure leads to worse performance and overall well-being. Conversely, less pressure relates to better performance and psychological health.

Internal Motivation for School: A Parenting Primer

So, how do we do tip the motivation scales? The motivation science within autonomy-supportive parenting has answers. In fact, the secret sauce for how several autonomy-supportive strategies “work” is by increasing a child’s sense of agency and ownership. This comes from targeting their internal motivation. Some tips:

1. Acknowledge and accept.

If your child doesn’t like school or “hates” certain teachers/classes, acknowledge this instead of talking them out of it. Recognize that going to school or certain classes feels really hard and you’re proud of them for doing it anyways. Remember to demonstrate acceptance of your child no matter how they are performing academically. If they are struggling and you have concerns, approach them from a place of supporting their potential instead of pressuring them to be different. Many—and perhaps most—kids are not good fits for the school environment. It’s important for us to accept that this may be a possibility for our child and look for ways to nurture any pathways to a positive experience in school rather than to expect straight A’s.

2. Reduce focus on grades.

If your child is in elementary school, grades likely have no significance except maybe to alert you to learning problems. In Wallace’s reporting for her book, she found that mothers of middle schoolers were the most anxious about school performance. Middle school is often when online portals enter the picture. (I could write a whole newsletter about online portals—the siren song for controlling parenting!) Resist the pull of examining each assignment every time an email pings.

Stay aware of the bigger picture of how your child feels about school. Focus on where your child finds a sense of pride and accomplishment. These early adolescent years involve drastic growth in executive functioning abilities that contribute to mentally organizing information, keeping up with homework, studying ahead for tests, etc., so look at middle school as the training grounds for building better habits that will pay off in high school. In high school, I know the stakes feel higher as grades really do matter for college. But this is exactly when internal motivation matters the most too, so stay focused on your child’s internal motivation meter as the most enduring way to influence better grades.

3. Find areas of choice.

Children and teens endure day after day of school with little choice in the matter. Where we can help them find choices, however, the better for their internal motivation. It could be choice in how to approach the homework routine. Or choice about which country their Spanish project covers, what to read for fun, or which clubs and activities they want to do after school – if any. As Edward Deci wrote, “meaningful choice engenders willingness.”

4. Be aware of skill level.

Research has shown the importance of “optimal challenge” in building competence. If a task is too easy, a child becomes bored and unmotivated. If it is too difficult, a child becomes anxious and inefficient. Tune into your child’s ability level and meet them at that level with your expectations. For example, if reading tests place a child below grade level, get them books at that level rather than pushing them to read more advanced books because they “should.” Or if a teen has a good amount of challenge in middle school math, don’t push them into honors for high school. Feeling competent aids internal motivation!

“So I Just Ignore Grades?”

You might be reading this and thinking, “so I just go totally hands-off when it comes to my kid and academics and not care about their grades?” Not quite. I have a part two to this essay about how we can impart values, rules, and expectations in either healthy or unhealthy ways. High standards have their place in parenting, but it’s how we communicate these standards that makes the difference between a child feeling internally or externally motivated.

The Course

Just a few more days to enroll in my inaugural Parent Smarter, Not Harder course! It’s a small group program I designed for you, the parent who wants to kickstart more autonomy support in your home but isn’t sure how and is just so tired.

It’s like nothing else I’ve seen out there — I meet with a small group of you virtually an hour a week for six weeks. Each session uses science-based techniques to make steps toward lasting, meaningful change. All you need to do is fill out this enrollment form, I send you a link for a 15-minute Zoom call to get to know each other, and then you’re in! You get the guidance of the person who literally wrote the book on Autonomy-Supportive Parenting (that’s me) and a supportive community of like-minded parents. Spots are filling up so get yours now!

How’s your school year going so far? How do you motivate your unmotivated kids? Share with the rest of us!