Rabbi Moshe Gans
Summer vacation is coming to an end, and with it the respite for parents with school-age children. With the start of the new school year, we once again need to come up with incentives for children to study well and follow a routine. With this in mind, parents look for ways to motivate their children so that the desire to learn comes from the children themselves, rather than from outside pressure.
Motivation is the driving force that prompts a person to act.
It is a “dynamic psychophysiological process that governs human behavior and determines its organization, direction, consistency, and activity.” Another view: motivation is the sum of one's motives; obtaining something specific (material or otherwise), in the course of which a person experiences positive emotions from obtaining it, or negative emotions from dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.
Parents usually act as an external motivating force, giving a child positive incentives (gifts, praise) and negative ones (being scolded or having something taken away). But this creates unstable motivation—learning does not become a need of the child's own. It turns out that only the parents need it, and they are forced to keep finding new ways to engage the child in learning.
There is an “alternative” option—to blame the teachers because the learning process is structured in an uninteresting way, the teacher puts no effort into supplementary materials, and the children sense that the teacher has no interest in the subject being taught.
This is a tempting way to relieve ourselves of responsibility—the parent is not to blame; let the school sort it out. But the child is ours. In fact, we are the ones responsible for the child's future, for what they will be equipped with in adult life.
And the ability to learn is one of the most important gifts we can give a child.
It is better to cultivate a child's desire to discover new things and their curiosity at home, rather than rely on the school. The fact that children are naturally inquisitive can make our task easier, and the main thing, really, is not to undermine this quality in the child. It is often pressure that destroys a child's natural inner desire to learn.
However, if a child associates school with a boring, compulsory intake of knowledge, let home be the place where knowledge is acquired willingly, where the atmosphere is filled with learning (through conversations with the parents themselves and the books they choose, rather than through gadgets).
So, we have decided to motivate our child. And not just when it comes to schoolwork, but also household chores, assigned duties, attending extracurricular classes—anything at all. How do we do this?
We will discuss this in detail in the next articles, in which we will examine four methods of motivation and other aspects of the subject.
A Few Important Nuances
Once the goal has been achieved and the child has begun doing something independently—netilat yadayim in the morning, brushing their teeth, getting up on time—that's it: the parent steps back and hands control over to the child. This is a very important point—to stop monitoring everything as soon as the system is working independently. Do not breathe down the child's neck. It is now the child's own responsibility—how they do it and what method they use, even if it differs from yours. After all, who said our way is the best?
Once a task has become the child's responsibility, you should not do it for them.
If a child is supposed to sweep and has not done it, we do not sweep for them. If a child has forgotten about a school report, we do not write it for them. We cannot cushion every fall, everywhere and always. It is better for the child to face the consequences of their actions now and learn independence from the experience than to learn it as an adult.
Calling them “consequences” is more accurate than calling them punishments, since punishment may involve a kind of “revenge” on the part of a parent (or teacher), whereas in this case they follow logically from the child's own actions. Because these are consequences, they set certain boundaries for the parent—there is no room for emotion here. We need to think through which specific consequences of the child's actions will affect the child, and completely eliminate extra words (“I told you so”) and actions (that add to the burden of the mistake).
Every new day is a clean slate when it comes to the child's behavior.
Do not despair, so that your child does not despair. A new day has arrived, bringing opportunities, accomplishments, and improvement. Do not remind your child of past mistakes; recall only past successes.
May the new school year bring us plenty of patience and strength, enough faith in our own abilities and our child's, successes, and accomplishments!
Prepared by Mrs. Zissi Skarzhinskaya, based on Rabbi Moshe Gans's book “Helping Without Breaking”
To be continued