In all the years I have been working with parents I am always amazed at how many of them believe they have to help by showing children what to do.

Well, I’m here to tell you, nothing could be further from the truth!

It breaks my heart but parents who try to show children how to do their homework are needlessly heading for disaster.  And the worst part is that it just doesn’t have to happen!

If you want to avoid their fate ( and I know you do!) here is the one most catastrophic mistake parents make and how to avoid it.

Never, never, tell your child how to do homework.

I know, it sounds harsh, you want to help your child by telling them what they can do to get their homework finished, but believe me you are doing your child no good if you try to do this.

Just think about it.  If your child is struggling to finish his homework it is because he cannot do it quickly and easily.  Why can’t he do it quickly and easily?  That is the question you need to ask. Once you ask that question you will know what kind of support your child needs.

If your child is struggling with homework here are some questions to ask:

Q. Why don’t you know what you have to do?

A. I haven’t learned this; I’ve forgotten what to do; I didn’t understand what I was being taught; I can’t do it.

Possible responses –

* Contact the teacher and suggest that your child needs extra help.

* Hire a tutor.

* Set up an homework agenda process.

Q. Can you do this work?

A. No, it is too hard!

Possible responses -

* Why do you think it is too hard?

*Have you forgotten what to do?

* Who can help you with this?

Your job is to discover why your child is struggling with homework, and then to provide the support needed to prevent the situation from happening again.   If you don’t do this the problem will never be solved and your child will continue to struggle with homework and may even give up on learning.  There will certainly be some stress around the house!

So, stop dong your child’s work for them. Stop doing the teacher’s work for them.

Start discovering why your child finds learning difficult and then provide the support he or she needs.

No matter how long you have been trying to help your child with homework chances are that you are still trying to help your child with homework in ways that don’t work.  Yes, your child might get a better grade on one piece of work, but his ability to learn will not have improved.

The good news is that by asking questions, like the ones I have described above, you can avoid this issue.

I heard someone say this a few days ago, it is something my mother used to say to me, but I haven’t heard it for ages. As a young child I remember that when I was struggling to learn how to knit, or to make a bed properly, or to do any of the thousand things she showed me how to do she would always say “It is easy when you know how!”

At the time it didn’t seem to help much. I would still get frustrated and upset, but my mother, being my mother, would patiently (or sometimes not so patiently, she is human after all!) showed me yet again how to do things right.

And it is true it IS easy when you know how!

Once you know HOW to do things, how to bake a cake, how to fix a car, how to read a map, how to build a house…. the actual doing of the thing makes much more sense and may even become second nature.  How often have you been driving and looked up to wonder how you got to where you are?

It is the ‘knowing HOW’ that is the difference between what you can’t do and what you can do.

Too often we confuse not knowing how with the inability to do something.

For instance, children say they can’t do their homework when they are totally capable of being able to do the work, the problem is that they just don’t know HOW to do the work. Their feeling that they can’t do the work has nothing to do with their ability and everything to do with whether or not they know how to do it.

It is easy when you know how.

So, the next time  your child says, “I can’t do that”, take a moment and reflect that he could do it, and could probably do it easily if he knew how to do it. Don’t let lack of knowing how to do something effect his belief in his ability to do something.

Many parents think that their child is incapable of learning when the truth is that the child just doesn’t know how to learn.  How can we expect children to learn if we don’t teach them how?

Let us stop putting the cart before the horse – another of my mother’s sayings! – and make sure children know HOW to learn before we expect them to learn. Otherwise we are building a life of frustration for ourselves and one of disappointment and anger for our children.

It IS easy when you know how.

Does your child know how to learn?

Do YOU know how to help?

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I have been writing for some time about the way some people (me included) learn backwards rather than forwards.  And it seems to have hit a nerve.  I have had several people tell me that it makes sense to them , that they understand why they have been finding it difficult to learn the way everybody else does, that they no longer feel alone or left out!

So I have decided to start a new movement – a movement of Backward Learners!

No longer will it be seen as odd to read the end of a book before the beginning!

No longer will you feel afraid of knowing the answer without knowing how you got there!

No longer will you accept that everything has to start at the beginning and work towards the end!

Soon everyone will understand that some of us are Backward Learners and that it is O.K.  Yes, we will still have to put up with a world designed for Forward Learners, we will still have to answer questions about why we do things the way we do, we will still struggle to help others understand us.

But, I now believe that there are enough of us to make a difference! We are not alone!  We can stand up and proudly accept who we are!

We work, and learn, Backwards. This is no better or no worse than those who learn Forwards, who like ordered lists, who start at #1 and go through to #10, who don’t know what the ending of anything will be, who don’t have our vision of the future, who find it difficult to take leaps of faith …..

I could go on but I am sure – that if you are a Backward Learner – you understand.  If you are a Forward Learner, don’t despair, we are not dangerous, we will not shake the foundations of the educational system – well not yet anyway – you are safe in your straightforward approach to learning. We don’t seek to oust you from your position of prominence in schools and other learning institutions.

But we do need to be accepted for who we are, we do need to be allowed to learn the way we learn best, we do need to be acknowledged and rewarded for all our hard work.

Our time has come!

If you have ever struggled to do well in school, if you have ever wondered why some people found it easier to learn than you did, if you ever knew that you were bright even when your grades, and other people, said otherwise, then you too are probably a Backward Learner!

I urge you to stand up and be counted!  I implore you to take your rightful place in society!  We have been ignored and misunderstood for too long.

We can bend the world to our needs. The world needs our vision and our persistence and adaptability, skills that we have developed as a way of handling the Forward Learning world we live in.

Are you a Backward Learner?

Accept it, work with it, use it to help you – and your child – reach your dreams.

Our time is NOW!

Please add your comments below and let us start a movement!

“We’re never going to get the project of schooling right by trying to re-invent the learning process. We will only get it right by, first, fully understanding the learning process and, second, developing environments that honor and respect that understanding. (It’s really the ultimate culminating task, isn’t it.)”

You are your child’s first and most important teacher.

Do you understand your child’s learning process?

Do you know how to develop a home learning environment that respects how your child learns?

If not what are you doing about it?

Every child has a Unique Path to Success, a way they can reach and use their learning potential.

Only when you know what that Path is can you guide your child along it.  My Pathfinder Kits help you discover your child’s Unique Path to Success.

You have tried nagging, and that didn’t work!  You have tried bribing, and that only worked for a short time!  You have probably even tried cajoling and threatening, all to no avail!  You still can’t get your child to do their work!

The problem is that you are not letting your child take responsibility for his work.  You are taking on the responsibility of getting him to do the work and letting your child off the hook.  Just what he wants.

But, you say, how will he get his work done if I stop nagging, and I stop bribing and cajoling?

Simple, you make it his problem not yours!

One mother was surprised at the changes in her son when she took my advice and did this.

John (not his real name!) was not doing well in school.  His grades had dropped because he never finished his homework or got his assignments in on time.  His mother knew this was the problem so she tried helping him get his work finished.  She kept reminding him of what he had to do and asking him if he had done it.  She kept score of how long he spent doing homework and became worried when it didn’t look like he had spent long enough to finish his work.  She offered bribes for good grades and threats for poor work.

And nothing changed.

Her son continued to not finish his work and she continued to get more and more frustrated and upset.

She knew that her son could do the work, she just wasn’t sure that he would do it, and do it on  time.

When I talked to her son about this issue he was very clear about the problem.  He did not want his mother bugging him and asking about his work every evening.  He wanted to get on with it in his own way and in his own time.  When I suggested that he had never shown that he could finish his assignments if he did this he agreed.  But he said that he spent so much time trying to avoid being nagged that he had little time left to actually do the work

We came to an agreement.  He would do all his work, on time and to his best ability, if his mother would stop asking him about it!

I don’t know what was harder, him doing his work or his mother not saying anything to him.  All I do know is that at the end of a couple of weeks his grades were going up and his mother was much less stressed and upset.

By making her son take responsibility for his work she had helped him show what he could do and learned to trust him more.

The moral of this tale?  If you want your child to be responsible give them the space to be responsible.

A Word Smart child prefers to learn when lessons are explained, discussed, or written.

They learn best by listening, talking, reading, writing, possibly even texting.

So why shouldn’t they do well in school where nearly all lessons require a student to read, write, understand directions?

If your child is not Word Smart he or she will find school more difficult.  It is not fair, but it is the way it is.

Nearly every teacher I know is a Word Smart learner.  They believe in the power of words to help children learn.

Schools are full of words, words in books, words on the backboard, words on worksheets, words as instructions, words as warnings, words are the main source of communication in any school.

If your child is not Word Smart he has to work twice as hard as other children just to stay in the same place.

What ca you do to help?

You can adapt the way you help your child learn. You can help your child change the Word Smart tasks he has been given into the way he learns best.

It is not too difficult to do once you know how.

Stop watching your  smart child struggle to make sense of word smart schoolwork and start helping him or her understand how to make learning easier and quicker.

Your child deserves no less.

She wanted help.

A diagnostic assessment of her daughters learning skills showed that she had a couple of problems, a couple of weak learning skills and that these were holding her back and causing the trouble with her homework.

Her daughter had poor  organizational and planning skills.

Your might be asking how lack of these skills affected her learning? Surely these skills are more about how she did her homework rather than about how she learned?

The problem was that this girl did not have these skills.  It was not just a case of telling her to be more organized so she could get her work done more quickly, this girl did not know how to be organized.  She did not know how to plan her work.  As a result she quickly became confused, distracted, frustrated and upset when she had to work on her own.

Her mother tried to help, she spent hours every night making sure that her daughter finished her homework.  It must have been exhausting for both the mother and child.  Their relationship was suffering because of all the stress of getting the homework into school on time.

Once I knew what was causing the problem I was able to talk to both the mother and  daughter and explain better ways of working, ways that would help the daughter learn and understand skills of organization and planning.

I started with showing the daughter how to plan to write a book report.   I gave her worksheets to fill in after she had read each chapter of the book.  These worksheets were not full of questions but were designed to remind her of the main points of the story and to keep track of the characters and what they were doing. Then she could uses these worksheets as the basis of her book report.  Previously she had been reading the whole book and then trying to write a book report.  She had no organization or plan in place to help her learn.

Once she began to trust the process of organizing and planning we moved onto other areas of her work.

We set up a system for keeping all her homework in separate piles so that she could work on one subject and finish it before she started the next subject.  These piles not only helped keep her desk tidy but it also acted as a visual reminder of the work she had finished and the work she had yet to do.  She could track her progress.

Homework became much less of a hassle.

Once this girl understood the benefits of organization and planning, and gradually learned the skills to do this her ability to learn increased dramatically.

It is OK to tell your teenage son to tidy up his room when you know he knows how to do it but it is not OK to expect him to do a good job if he doesn’t know what to do, if he does not have the skills he needs to get the job done.

Does your child have the skills they need to be successful? Does your child know HOW to learn?

In Finland people read for 46 minutes a day, and Finland is the top scorer in the latest PISA research.

Canadians read for 40 minutes a day (someone must read much less because i read for much longer every day!)

In Spain people only read for 15 minutes a day (they have low rates of literacy there).

It is book reading that makes the difference, not reading boring school text books.  Book reading not only increases vocabulary and verbal ability it also provides an understanding of how other people talk and

So, books count.

Carry on reading to and with your child.

OK, time to fess up.  I was a teacher for many, many, years and I gave lip service, as all teachers do, to the idea that parents need to get involved in their child’s education.  I don’t think that you will find a teacher that disagrees with this statement.

Teachers see parental involvement as parents helping their children do their schoolwork, or reading to their children, or volunteering to help with school outings.  They think that it is the parents who come to school, who attend meetings, who do the photocopying (!) that are the one who are getting involved with their child’s education.

I admit, I thought this way before I learned more about the important ways parents help children learn.

What I learned astonished me.

When I actually talked to parents about how they were helping their children I learned that not only were all parents trying to help their children but they were spending vast amounts of time, effort and money doing it.

Parents who had never been into school to any meetings, parents who had never volunteered to go on outings with the students, parents who never commented on report cards, were all involved in their child’s education one way or another.

Parents were buying workbooks, paying for tutoring, helping with homework, asking friends for advice, teaching their child sign language, sending their child to language classes, and finding many other ways of supporting their child’s education.

And most of the time teachers never knew about this, they never knew about all the extra support that children were getting from their parents.  parents and children were embarrassed about telling the school that they were providing extra support for their child, they thought it reflected on the work of the teacher – it probably did!

The problem was that the ways parents were supporting their children were often in conflict with what the child was learning in school.  As a result children were confused and conflicted about how to learn.

I remember one child telling me, in frustration, that his ‘other teacher’ told him to do his work a different way. This student was angry, he was trying to do what he was expected to do but he was being told to do two different things!  No wonder he was frustrated.

So, back to my original question – Does it matter how yon are involved in your child’s education?

The short answer is yes, it does matter.  Your involvement needs to be such that it enhances your child’s learning rather than confuses it.

The longer answer is that ANY involvement is better than none.  When you child knows that you care about how well he learns, that you are willing to spend time and effort helping him learn, he will try harder in class, and that alone can lead to greater learning success.

So, get involved, any way you can.  Then, work out what type of involvement works for you and stick to it.

Your child will thank you for your support.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Children do get bored in school.  Either the work is too easy or they are not interested in the subject or thye just don’t want to learn that day.  More often than not this is the result of poor teaching but even the best teacher has to teach boring stuff on occasion.

Sometimes ‘boring’ can mean much more.  It can be an indication that your child has a learning problem and this is the excuse he or she is using to avoid having to deal with it.

Children are ‘bored’ when -

*  They don’t understand what they are being told

*  They can’t pay attention to waht is happening

*  They need to get some exercise rather than sitting still

*  They can’t do the work but don’t want to admit it

*  They want to get out of telling parents about thier day

*  They find work too easy or uninteresting

*  The teacher is not very good

*  They are asked to do repetitive work

*   They don’t understand why they have to learn this stuff!

So, being ‘bored’ at school is a way of hiding a problem of some kind.  Often the problem is with your child’s ability to learn.  If your child uses this excuse on a regular basis you need to find out more, you need to find out what it is that is causing your child to be ‘bored’ at school.

How can you do this?

Ask your child to tell you more, try and get more information about WHY he was bored.  If your child cannot tell you offer some suggestions and ask him to chose the one that is nearest to his thoughts.

For instance you could ask if your child was bored because-

*  The work was too easy/too hard

*  He didn’t like the subject/teacher

*  Other kids were messing around and causing problems

*  He wanted to be doing something else

* He hated school and was never going to go back!!

This should at least get the conversation started and give you a chance to find out why your child is bored and what you can do about it.