Today’s oxymoron—students and responsibility     038

Perhaps you are quite used to hearing your children make excuses about not performing so well at school. Indeed there never seems to be an end of it and children seem quite creative with a variety of excuses they come up with. Some children even go one step further—they hide their school reports and pretend they didn’t arrive. Sometimes in the case of parents with a non-English-speaking background this sort of strategy can be successful for a while. There is one trend however that remains almost universal and that is where performance is less than expected it is someone else’s fault.

Quite a deal of research has been done on this and I myself was involved in a research project, at the University of Sydney, which explored how children perceive success and failure. In the experiment children completed a number of tasks and were then asked to contribute their success or failure to four reasons: ability, effort, luck and the difficulty of the task. Now you are probably wondering why such research would need to be conducted because no doubt you can predict the results. Yes, when children were successful it was due to their ability or effort, but when the children were unsuccessful it was due to bad luck or the task being too difficult. So success is attributed to personal factors and failure attributed to external unalterable causes.

Even in older high school children teachers observe the same trend. When performance is disappointing somehow it is the teacher’s fault, as in “she doesn’t like me” or “I am being discriminated against”. When children are successful, usually teachers are not thanked as the success was due to ability or effort. Disappointingly some parents contribute to this pattern of performance attribution.

What needs to happen?  Children from a young age should understand that what is expected of them is the best which they can achieve. Not each and every time but as a general trend and motivation. As I write this it is this only a week away from the start of the Higher School Certificate. And as you can imagine Year 12 students are hoping that the questions will be easy, or they will get questions which they can answer. The children are counting on the Board of Studies to make things go well, and if things don’t, then we know whom to blame.

A more positive approach is to instead hope the questions are difficult, perhaps unexpectedly different. This means that most students will have trouble, and these benefits children with character—your children, actually. Boldly attacking the question, and working at it over time will nearly always yield a surprisingly good answer. So many children though just give up in the first five minutes, and write down a mostly prepared answer that doesn’t really hit the mark.

Actually, of course, changing your child’s character a week before a major test or assessment is perhaps a little late. Character is something developed over time in response to all types of situations as in activities of daily living and during family outings, holidays etc. It’s a case of every cloud having a silver lining—you know the proverb. Indeed most books on success stress the value of persistence as the main ingredient. Encourage your children then to see effort as the main determinant of outcome, once tasks are within your child’s growing ability. Let your children see you taking the same approach.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services