Supporting your child’s academic experience gets trickier by the day. Between changing curriculums, technology use in the classroom, and differing paces of learning it’s easy for parents to feel at a loss about how to best support their children’s learning.
The good news is that academic support doesn’t have to be difficult. The right approach to academic support for your child relies on understanding your child, a few simple setups at home, and knowing where to go for additional support if you need it.
Setting Up the Home for Success
Academic success starts with a few simple setups at home to support learning. We’re not talking about turning your house into a classroom. Rather, we’re talking about ensuring that there’s a setup that allows children to learn naturally in the home.
The most important component of this is ensuring that there’s routine in place. Children thrive when they know what to expect and when learning time is quarantined from distractions. Setting aside time for homework, ensuring a quiet study spot or even just checking in regularly about the school day goes a long way in helping children learn at home.
This might surprise you, but the physical setup isn’t nearly as important as the mental setup for studying. Some children thrive in silence in a dedicated study space while others require noise and your presence to learn effectively. The best approach? Go with whatever works.
Knowing When to Seek Extra Help
Figuring out when your child needs extra academic support that you cannot provide at home can be one of the trickiest things to decipher as a parent. Knowing when to reach out for extra help isn’t always obvious and it might not even be linked to grades.
Often, parents notice a drop in confidence levels as one of the first signs that a child is in need of some extra academic support. When children who were eager to learn before suddenly start kicking against homework or showing fear of a particular subject, it usually indicates that the gaps in learning have formed. Sometimes it might just manifest as general frustration with homework tasks.
Many parents find that a trained tutor allows for the academic support their child needs in a one-on-one capacity to overcome obstacles or to continue to excel beyond what the classroom offers. The decision to approach tutors shouldn’t be seen as an admission of parental failure, but rather as a proactive step in seeking out additional academic support.
Fostering Communication with Teachers
Academic support can work wonders in conjunction with good communication between parents, children, and teachers.
Teachers can spot trouble signs that most parents miss as they are spending hours every day with their students. Reaching out to teachers for regular check-ins provides you with extra eyes on your child’s academic experience. The best approach is to maintain regular contact throughout the year rather than only when report cards are around the corner or problems have surfaced.
Learning Styles Are Real
Learning styles do exist and understanding them can help parents to help their children succeed academically. Children learn differently. Some learn by being shown information. Others learn by listening to information, while another group of children needs to work with physical items to learn. Understanding these differences in learning styles can help you decide how best to support your child’s learning.
Believe it or not, many parents find that mismatched learning styles are the reason why gifted children battle with specific lessons or teachers. Understanding this helps you adapt the way you parent them academically and also to decide on additional academic resources.
Technology Needs Boundaries
Technology presents learning challenges that previous generations have never had to overcome. Technology enhances learning, but it also poses a challenge to students due to the level of distraction it poses to focus and critical thinking skills.
Setting up boundaries for technology use during classwork and study times is essential to keep children focused when the need arises. Working with your child to establish suitable boundaries for technology use during study times will ensure that children are focused when they need to be. This might involve phone downtime, times when educational tools can be used or even a family agreement about when devices can be put away.
Providing Homework Support
Striking the balance between helping your child with their homework and doing the homework for them can be a tricky task to navigate as a parent. Get it wrong one way and they’ll fail. Get it wrong the other way and they will expect you to do everything for them!
The key is to assist your child in completing their homework rather than doing it for them. Use this time to help your child grasp how to break down homework tasks, brainstorm the best ways to solve problems posed in homework questions or concepts that might feel challenging.
Where extended amounts of homework is becoming a challenge, it’s often an indication that there’s a mismatch in the way homework is given and what children can reasonably be expected to complete on their own.
Recognizing Positive Developments
Academic support isn’t only a channel for recognizing negatives in a child’s academic journey, but also recognizing positives and rewarding them accordingly. Academic environments can be tough on children, so students who feel recognized for their effort are more likely to remain motivated during tough periods in their academic life.
The most effective praise focuses on effort rather than talent or academic performance. When children feel that there’s merit in trying something new or failing something once before getting it right, they’ll tackle subjects that might feel difficult.
Academic success has nothing to do with getting the answers right or knowing everything as a parent. It has everything to do with staying involved, adapting along the way and knowing where to turn when kids need extra help!
