KiasuParents - Parenting in Singapore

1. What do you like about kiasuparents.com? What improvements would you want to see in kiasuparents.com?

2. What are the websites or discussion forums that you know are about or related to PSLE. Can you list them? Do you find them useful?

3. Do you think that there is a need for another website?

4. Do you believe that better schools have a conducive learning environment?Why?

5. What would you do to motivate your child?

6. What would you do to ensure that your child is doing well in PSLE?

7. Did PSLE affect your child’s behaviour? If so, how?

8. What do you like about kiasuparents.com? What other features would you like to see? Do you think that a new website/discussion forum for parents is necessary?

9. There is a Chinese saying “考不好未必有机会重来” (translation: If you don’t do well in the exam, you don’t get a second chance). Do you think this is true? Why?

Just taking one of your questions - about motivating your children - consider the following:


Top 10 top strategies for Parents to Motivate their Children to Study

First, 3 principles of motivation:
• You have to realise that you can’t do it. No-one can motivate anyone else, the only real motivation is self-motivation, but what you can do is to arrange the conditions so that self-motivation will occur

• Secondly, regular rewards don’t work, they always become expectations and lose any motivational power. Random, spontaneous, unexpected rewards sometimes work well though.

• Thirdly, physical punishment may work in the short term but will always create long term resentment and teaches the child that violence is a solution to problems in the home, avoid it always

10 Strategies:

1) Be immaculately organised and teach your children how to manage their own time. Make sure there is a year planner prominently displayed with all your children’s key test, exam, assignment dates on it.

2) Talk about purpose with your children – why is it important for them to do well at school - provide role models, examples, stories from your own life

3) Encourage them to dream of their best possible future occupation and then plan out all the stages they will need to go through to get there from here

4) Focus on intrinsic motivators for study – satisfaction, completion, pride, overcoming challenges, discovering capabilities, gaining knowledge and skills, creating more choices/options in their lives

5) Talk about courage, the courage it takes to do something you know is going to be hard, like studying, use biographies, stories of great courage

6) Help them to develop the habit of delayed gratification, having their pleasures but only when all the work is finished

7) In order to improve your child’s learning they must focus on the two things they have control of – effort and strategy use. Focus all your praise on the effort they put in and their clever use of different strategies, avoid praising their talent, intelligence or ability.

8) If they have any difficulty learning anything new, get them to focus on their process, how they are learning, and try new and different strategies, resources, resource people

9) If they have difficulties keeping up, help them with their planning, break down each assignment into component parts and build deadlines for each part – put them on the wall chart

10) Teach them that patience, persistence, determination, focus and concentration are the virtues of education, they are the skills good education teaches us

Thanks for the tips Lance G King I think they are very useful and I could probably benefit from using some of them myself. But there is one tip I am not quite sure I understand, what exactly do you mean by:

6) Help them to develop the habit of delayed gratification, having their pleasures but only when all the work is finished

Gd post by lance g king

Hi Dad again2,

Delayed gratification just means putting off your pleasures until the work is done. Every adult knows how to do this but often children have to be taught how. They need to be encouraged to have all their favourite pleasures but to learn the self-discipline to have their pleasures only when the work is done.
The classic research study in this area which came to be known as the 'marshmellow test', directly linked academic, social, emotional and financial success to the ability to practice delayed gratification:

At Stanford University in the 1960's a psychologist named Walter Mischel created an experiment that he ran with four year old children from the local crèche. He set up interviews between these children, one at a time, and an adult researcher. The researcher would ask each child a few questions that they could easily answer and when they were finished he would take a marshmallow out of his pocket and put it on the table in front of the child as a reward for them. He would then tell them that they could eat it straight away if they wanted to, but he was going to go out of the room for a few minutes and when he came back if they hadn’t eaten it then they would get another marshmallow as well. If the marshmallow had been eaten then the child would get no more.
Then the researcher went away leaving the four year old in the room by his or her self. Just one child and one marshmallow and the thing was, the researcher didn't stay away for just a minute or two he stayed away for a long time (up to 20 minutes). Also the children did not realise it but they were being observed through all this time by psychologists behind mirrored glass.
Now of course some of the kids ate the marshmallow straight away but some of them didn't. Some of them went to great lengths to keep from eating the marshmallow - talking strictly to themselves, covering their eyes with their hands, hiding under the table or in the corner of the room. Doing whatever they could to keep themselves from eating the first marshmallow. Finally the researcher did come back and if the marshmallow was gone the child was allowed to leave, if the marshmallow was still there, untouched, the child got another marshmallow and then was allowed to leave.
So they ended up with two groups, those that grabbed and those that held out.
These two groups were then followed up for many years afterwards and they were tested every way possible and the results were compared between the two groups.
Now the results that they got were very significant because every way it was possible for them to test these kids as they grew up - the group that had held out did better.
They were more academically competent - 30% higher test results, better able to concentrate and learn, better at setting goals and achieving them and more socially competent - they handled challenges better, they were more self reliant, confident, trustworthy and dependable, they took the initiative and were less likely to stress, regress or give up in the face of difficulties.
Later in life these two groups were measured again and the hold out group were found to have been much more successful in life in general and were much happier and had an income on average, double that of the other group.

Now the point of the story is not what you think you might have done as a four year old in that situation. The point is simply that one of the best measures of our ability to create success for ourselves is whether we have learned how to put off pleasure in order to get the work done. Not to deny pleasure, but to delay it in order to get the work done. This is called delayed gratification.
The secret to handling distractions, if they are thoughts of some of the pleasurable things in your life, is to say to yourself, yes I will have that for me, I will watch TV or YouTube or spend time texting my friends or on Facebook , but I will have it after I get my work done. As a reward for my efforts.
The trick is to always pay yourself back for hard work by using the pleasurable things in your life as rewards for getting the work done. You still need to have your pleasures during your study weeks but have them after you have got your study done, not before.