Your child’s lack of motivation isn’t something that can be addressed with a single answer. But as a parent, you can set up a system designed to help your child succeed. Not with excessive tutoring or forcing your child to complete mounds of homework, but by helping your child to build character, develop good habits, and chase the right goals. 

Read on to find out more!

Adopt the Mindset of Top Students

What motivates students who consistently excel in academics, even from a young age? 

In The Secrets of Top Students, author Stefanie Weisman surveyed 45 people with exceptional academic records on how they achieved success. She says that what many people fail to realise is this — there’s much more to good grades than using effective study and test-taking techniques. In fact, she says that striving for academic excellence is a “lifestyle,” where one has to “eat well, sleep right, work hard, and above all, have the drive and determination to succeed.” 

When Weisman polled her survey group on what factors motivated them to do well, here’s what they listed:

• Determination
• Hard work
• Desire to learn
• Pressure from self
• Ambition
• Self-control
• Supportive family
• Good teachers
• Good time management

Do the above factors apply to your child? If not, how can you help your child to fill at least some of these gaps? For instance, are there extracurricular activities that your child can pursue — such as sports — to build qualities like determination and the willingness to work hard? 

Also, is it possible that your child is losing motivation due to a negative mindset? There are forms of ‘bad’ motivation, which create a sense of unhealthy competition, a fear of failure, and an over-reliance on external validation. These include:

• Wanting to be better than others
• Seeking praise from others
• Being afraid to try new things
• Feeling worthless if goals are not met
• Setting narrow and lofty goals, such as getting into top schools

Therefore, before your child proceeds to set and work towards academic goals, some self-reflection is necessary:

1. Ask two vital questions: Why is this goal important? Are there healthy motivations for this goal, or does your child crave something unsustainable, such as external validation? If your child truly desires an outcome for healthy reasons, how can this goal be broken down into smaller parts, with definite timelines? 
2. Visualise the rewards that your child can look forward to when goals are achieved.
3. Create affirmation statements to repeat when your child has negative thoughts, such as “I feel that I have worked hard when I spend a bit of time on revision each day.”

With this in place, your child can dive into the next aspect of motivation — habits!

Help Your Child Build Good Study Habits

To write his book Become a Straight A Student, author and college professor Cal Newport surveyed top-performing students around the US, to uncover the study habits that they had in common. 

Based on the results, here are his recommendations:

1. Always record major academic events (such as exam dates or project deadlines) in a diary or calendar. On a daily basis, take five minutes to decide what tasks to tackle, and estimate how long each task might take. Your child can do this after returning home from school, once he or she has had a short rest.
2. Work with your child to minimise procrastination, by making sure the workspace is free of clutter and distractions ahead of time. During work sessions, your child should hydrate and munch on healthy snacks to keep energy levels up.
3. Some tasks — such as completing a practice exam paper — will naturally be more tedious. Arrange with your child to schedule one or two ‘hard days’ into the week to tackle challenging work, and be sure to plan relaxing activities before and after these days.
4. Study for an hour, and then take a break. This is a tried-and-tested routine for many good students, and it should work for your child too.

As for study strategies specifically geared towards preparing for the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination), here are some science-backed answers to commonly asked questions from parents:

• Should my child spend more time reviewing notes or working on practice questions? The focus should be on practice questions. Unlike the passive act of reading notes, answering a question requires active effort to retrieve information from one’s memory, and this promotes information retention.
• Should my child focus on MCQs (multiple-choice questions) or open-ended questions? According to science, the harder one has to work to retrieve information, the more likely it is that the information is retained in the memory. This means that practising open-ended questions should result in greater gains than merely answering MCQs or True/False questions.
• Should my child work on topical exercises or exam papers? Unless your child is struggling with basic concepts, you should go with exam papers. Research has found that being tasked to solve problems in a mixed sequence — as opposed to working on sets of similar problems — results in improved performance over time.

Essentially, any form of revision that involves self-testing (e.g. practice papers, flashcards) is thought to be beneficial. If your child wants to spend time reading the textbook or making summary notes, encourage him or her to generate questions during reading (and answer them), write summaries from memory, or explain what’s been read to someone else. These are all considered active learning processes. 

Know When to Praise Your Child

No matter how your child is faring academically, try to resist the temptation to only praise for improved grades. Instead, look out for displays of:

• Effort
• Focus
• Discipline
• Perseverance
• Trying new strategies
• Seeking constructive feedback from others

These are what you should praise your child for, in order to encourage a growth mindset. 

Sometimes, your child may put in plenty of effort but still not see results. When this happens, do acknowledge your child’s efforts, but be careful not to minimise the poor results. When your child is ready, focus on discussing new approaches to studying, be it acquiring new learning resources, hiring new tutors, or switching to new work routines that might be more conducive for focus and concentration.

Beyond this, you and your child should understand and accept that everyone has a different learning curve. It’s OK to need more time to process information, or to need more support from teachers and tutors. To help your child stay motivated even when the chips are down, remind him or her that the long-term goal of learning is to become a better person, who can make a positive difference for others.

Want to chat with other parents about motivation? Join the conversation on the KiasuParents forum!