Communicate ‘big picture’ strategy to your child

DEAR MARIANN: “How do I moti­vate my 12-year-old to study when she always seems bored in school and lacks inter­est in her classes?

Mariann’s Response: When I read your ques­tion, imme­di­ately I think of depres­sion, espe­cially since those volatile teenage years are wait­ing with abound­ing hor­monal changes and phys­i­cal alter­ations. As men­tioned in pre­vi­ous columns, depres­sion has no age lim­its. Sadly I have heard of assess­ments for depres­sion being used on chil­dren as young as four. Has your daugh­ter vis­ited her pedi­a­tri­cian recently to deter­mine if depres­sion could be a fac­tor in her lax class­room attitude?

Another pos­si­bil­ity is that she might be “bored” from not being chal­lenged by her classes and need­ing a higher level of aca­d­e­mic place­ment. Mak­ing an appoint­ment with her school coun­selor might be a first step toward deter­min­ing if she would ben­e­fit from assign­ment into “advanced place­ment” classes or if there are alter­na­tive sub­jects that she could take more com­pat­i­ble to her per­son­al­ity and future goals.

Does she have a dis­like of one or some of her teach­ers? Are there other options for instruc­tors who might moti­vate her inter­est in those subjects?

The Khan Acad­emy, an online teach­ing method for hun­dreds of top­ics is rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing how stu­dents are learn­ing in many Amer­i­can class­rooms. The ser­vice is free and could pos­si­bly be a sec­ondary source of more mod­ern instruc­tive meth­ods that could inspire your daughter.

And finally, my ques­tion to you as a par­ent, what level of involve­ment do you have with her about the future and the career path she envi­sions for her­self? My cliché of “only being able to see as far for­ward as the hood of the car” is seem­ingly a chal­lenge for many youth. What is almost imme­di­ately in front of them is the only thing they can see presently, ver­sus look­ing out on the hori­zon and real­iz­ing that other options are just ahead. As her par­ent, teach­ing a “big pic­ture strat­egy” is essen­tial, ver­sus not just “liv­ing for the moment.”

Research­ing local options and tak­ing her to pro­fes­sional venues where she can shadow some­one who does what she might want to pur­sue for a career would be helpful.

After com­plet­ing both my under­grad­u­ate and grad­u­ate degrees, I had inter­est in pur­su­ing nurs­ing as a voca­tion. Even though I had suc­cess­fully com­pleted col­lege twice, due to my lack of a suf­fi­cient num­ber of chem­istry classes while attend­ing Delaware Hayes, I would have been required to have taken sev­eral high school chem­istry classes prior to ever pur­su­ing pre-nursing stud­ies. Need­less to say, I am a coun­selor ver­sus work­ing in a hos­pi­tal. Seem­ingly the pres­sure of “know­ing what you want to do with your life” is even more accen­tu­ated today in academia.

My last sug­ges­tion is to have a daily sched­uled “check-in” time dur­ing the school week for hear­ing about the just-concluded school day and both the suc­cesses and the chal­lenges she encountered.

It seems that ado­les­cents are ulti­mate mas­ters of the “one word answer” when respond­ing to an adult’s ques­tion. When hear­ing “fine” as her curt answer to your ques­tion, espe­cially about her day, please dig deeper, start a dia­logue, be nosy. At first your daugh­ter may resent your intru­sive­ness, but with the onslaught of text mes­sag­ing, ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills are now com­pro­mised espe­cially among our youth.

Hav­ing the abil­ity for in-depth con­ver­sa­tion and her knowl­edge that she has a par­ent who truly cares, will be valu­able life tools for her future success.

Mar­i­ann Main is a licensed coun­selor and a Delaware native. Her col­umn appears weekly on Sat­ur­days. To sub­mit a ques­tion and have Mar­i­ann answer it anony­mously, visit delgazette.com/life-questions-with-local-answers or send mail to the Delaware Gazette office, 40 N. San­dusky St., suite 203, Delaware, OH 43015.

Posted by Mariann Main on Oct 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.