With fewer exams during the primary school years, it’s becoming harder to gauge if a child is doing well in school. Most parents hope to get useful feedback and advice during parent-teacher meetings. However, when giving feedback, many teachers still focus on grades, because they assume that’s what parents are most interested in.

Here’s a thought: Why not decide for yourself what truly matters? Based on your experience and values, what aspects of growth do you hope to see in your child over the coming year?

Of course, this is not an easy question to answer. To help you along, we’ll outline some key areas to consider when evaluating your child’s progress in primary school. We hope you’ll find these suggestions useful!

Academic Progress

Often, Singaporean parents conflate school progress with a jump in grades. For instance, a parent might say, “I want my child to score a minimum of AL3 (80 marks and above) for every subject.” But what’s the reason behind this? Most likely, such a parent is thinking ahead to the Primary School Examination (PSLE), and eying specific schools with stringent cut-off points. And again, what is the motivation for believing that these schools are best for a child? 

By questioning the academic standards that you’re setting for your child, you can better determine whether your focus is on genuine learning, or simply on meeting societal expectations.

A suggestion: Instead of setting a goal for your child to score a minimum of 80 marks for a subject like English, consider broadening your perspective. For instance, you can look for real-world discussions that highlight communication challenges. This can reveal what might be most helpful to your child in future, such as having a richer vocabulary for better communication. 

Let’s say that after some research, you’ve decided your child should focus on improving their vocabulary. However, you’ll also need to appreciate that some things can’t be measured and quantified traditionally. There’s little value in forcing your child to read one book a month to learn 10 new vocabulary words a day, because that’s simply not how language works. Instead, you could explore films, TV shows, and podcasts together — these offer good examples of language use. Some parents play audiobooks or news podcasts for their children at bedtime, while others discuss current affairs at the dinner table or watch a show together and talk about it.

With such efforts, you may not see a direct improvement in your child’s grades, but it will bear fruit in the long run.

Social Skills

Typically, personality tests are more suited for adults, and some experts advise against letting children take such tests. If you’re curious about your child’s social development, focus on observing their social interactions to understand their strengths and areas for growth. As a start, you could find out who they’re talking to on the school bus, in class, and during co-curricular activities.

In every school, there may be a handful of children who are unusually reserved, saying almost nothing during school hours. If this describes your child, consider whether you or your partner had similar experiences and what encouraged you to become more sociable. These insights could help your child. For example, you could arrange playdates with familiar friends on weekends and school holidays. This ensures that even if your child is extremely quiet in school, they still have the opportunity to build genuine friendships and experience both bonding and conflict, which are essential for growth.

If you’re talking to your child’s teacher about social development, here are some questions to ask:

• Who does my child usually interact with during group activities or recess? Does my child prefer certain personality types?
• What were your considerations when choosing a seatmate or project partner for my child? How do you think this arrangement has benefitted my child? 
• Has my child had any conflicts with classmates or teachers? How did my child react?
• Are you happy with my child’s level of participation in class? How can we work together to help my child improve? (Usually, it’s the highly introverted children that require creative solutions. For instance, a child who is reluctant to speak up in class might be willing to submit questions or feedback through a learning app.)

Holistic Development

In the Singapore context, we tend to think of development in terms of co-curricular activities (CCAs) and enrichment classes. Driven parents will typically look to place their kids in competitive environments like school teams, so that kids can develop much-hyped qualities like grit and resilience through rigorous training, handling competition pressure, and dealing with defeat. 

There are advantages to such an approach if a child is a willing participant, and the family has the necessary resources to support the child. However, many children may still be at the exploration stage, and they may not thrive under stress. If your child is currently pursuing an activity and experiencing tension, you’ll have to assess whether it’s better to push on, or time to call it quits — you can seek advice from your child’s coaches and other experienced parents. In any case, unlike secondary schools, primary schools are quite open to having children switch CCAs for broader exposure. 

If your child doesn’t like the idea of enrichment classes and prefers to be home, it’s good to analyse their screen habits. One question to ask is: Are they primarily consumers, or producers? A child spending many hours a day coding up a game or creating an animation is quite different from someone who primarily plays games or scrolls social media. Setting some ground rules and expectations for screen time is an ongoing process, and even within the same home, parents may have to adopt different approaches for different children.  

Time for Relaxation

Is your child overscheduled on weekends and school holidays? Are their activities mostly focused on outcomes, or do they have some agency to plan their day, as well as play freely?

We may think it’s always beneficial to give children access to more experiences, but this may backfire if our children feel exhausted and inadequate, or worse, start to question if these back-to-back activities are actually a way to minimise family time.

As with all things in life, it’s necessary to find a balance. Instead of overhauling your child’s schedule, you can first try to create some fun family rituals that don’t require much effort. For instance, you could buy simple card games and play them together while having dinner. Many families also enjoy the daily games by the NYTimes, such as Wordle and Spelling Bee. 

Or you could devote an hour after dinner to watching a TV series together. Ideally, choose a series that runs for several seasons, so that everyone will be invested in wanting to know what happens next. To spice things up, you could even invent simple games to play while watching a show, such as a Bingo table of commonly used words — the first to get five in a row wins. 

These efforts may seem small, but they ensure daily relaxation for your child and build closeness over time. This is essential for your child’s well-being, and contributes to their overall success in school and beyond.

Want to chat with other parents about primary school life? Find a conversation to join on the KiasuParents forum!