“My child is so bright, but he is so disorganized/inconsistent/unmotivated… How do I get him to perform up to his potential?”
This is a common refrain for parents and teachers of kids with Executive Function difficulties – again, kids with plenty of brain power, but their control panel freezes up or goes offline with maddening irregularity.
How do we get our “smart but scattered” kids through a day at home, school, and life?
Here’s four pathways to helping your child successfully live up to his or her potential.
1. Purpose. What does your child need to do to be successful? How are you defining success? How is the child defining success? What balance of work and play, productivity and playfulness, striving and relaxing, are you seeking? What’s the point?
Describe what your child fulfilling his/her potential looks like. How would you know? Says who? Be clear on what behavioral or academic or social outcomes you’re seeking. Be clear that this fits your child’s developmental, temperamental, and environmental circumstances. Be both idealistic and realistic!
A major league baseball pitcher pitches a perfect game (no hits, no walks) maybe once in his career (if he’s lucky), and we don’t expect him to pitch a perfect game every time out on the mound after that. We expect day to day variation in performance in sports – and no doubt in life.
Make sure your child shares your vision, values, and goals. Does he or she have a clear purpose in mind for how helping with family chores or actually doing the homework each night or controlling one’s temper is meaningful and desirable?
2. Passion. Getting the child to care about certain goals is more a matter of the heart – it’s what motivates the child and inspires him or her to pursue a certain path even when the going gets tough. The more passion a child has for a particular subject or relationship – the more they care about it – the easier it is to harness the energy to achieve the goal you’ve set out for.
So seek out the passions that your child has – their interests and affinities – and help your child develop them wherever possible. Music, sports, nature, animals, machines, electronics, numbers, words, pictures, mysteries, foreign lands, family traditions, basketweaving, bowling, or bowhunting – it doesn’t matter – what turns your kid on? Foster exploration and development of these natural interests, and incorporate them into school learning regularly.
Where the child has a natural passion or love for the topic, person, or situation, we can easily encourage growth in that area – relying more on intrinsic motivation. In important functional areas (certain academic or behavioral standards) that the child doesn’t have much natural interest in, then we may need to provide additional incentives. Simply put, pair the things your child doesn’t much care about with something he or she does care about.
And accept the reality that your child isn’t going to be passionate or productive, let alone perfect, in all areas all the time. Sounds silly when we say it like that, but catch yourself with the unrealistic assumptions you make sometimes.
3. Preparation. Before beginning a week, a day, or a task with your child, spend several minutes “huddling up” and planning it out. Talk about the top priorities, and specify a specific plan of action for how you and your child will achieve the desired goals. Having already reviewed purpose and passion – the what and why – we now focus on the how to accomplish what we most desire.
Brainstorm possible solutions for how to get where you want to go. Now is the time to include the child in contributing – having some choice – about how to accomplish the goal. If the expectation is that your child will do a half-hour of homework every night, then she can have some say about when and where she’ll do it, not whether she’ll do it!
Enumerate the action steps. Fancy word, just means put them down, in order, numbered – ideally no more than 3-5 steps. And answer these questions: who will do what, when, and where? More precisely, have your child be able to tell you the answer to these questions.
And if there are working memory problems (for you or your child!), make sure the action plan is in a visible, usable calendar or checklist.
4. Persistence. “Let’s try it and see.” Whatever the plan, make sure you all commit to following it for the next week. Then agree to sit down and evaluate how it’s going. Talk about what’s working, or not, and what needs to be tweaked. Make a new, adjusted plan, write it on a cheat sheet or to do list, and stay with that revised plan for another week.
Try it and see, again. But not with great angst and frustration or burdensome expectations. Approach the task as a great experiment. Frame it with your child along these lines: “We’re going to try homework this way for the next week, and see if it gets better, worse, or stays the same. What’s your prediction? Why? What do you want to do to make it more likely to be a success?” Okay, game’s on!
Try it and see, again. Be curious, patient, and persistent. Keep on going, no matter what. But do so mindfully, paying attention to what parts of this game plan are working well, and what parts aren’t. Get your child to join you in being an investigator – a scientist or journalist or spy – seeking the truth – the holy grail of solutions for that mysterious problem that hasn’t been solved yet.
Look at the challenging situation as a mountaintop that hasn’t been summitted yet, but is now within reach (even if the journey has included some backtracking, sidetrails, and occasional dead ends.) No giving up, until we reach the peak. We are intrepid explorers in life. Be playfully persistent. Whatever it takes. Never, ever give up.
All of these steps will lead your child to significant Progress, Not Perfection.
Let’s rejoice in the small, daily miracles. Acknowledge them. Appreciate them.
Catch your child making any small step in a better direction – picking up his clothes, starting her homework, remembering to ask politely for a favor or raising a hand to speak – and offer brief, heartfelt words of praise as soon as it occurs. Blow encouraging breathes of fresh air onto the tiny sparks of a child’s efforts in order to ignite the fires of success.
And recognize the truth in the old saying “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” May you and your child keep putting one step in front of the other, and keep getting closer to fulfilling your potential, while recognizing that perfection is neither desirable nor achievable. Being perfectly imperfect every day, perhaps you are already just exactly where you need to be. Enjoy the journey along the way.
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