Preschooler hates school: My child says she hates school. What should I do?

My child says she hates school. What should I do?

Sometime when you’re feeling close and connected to your child (maybe after reading a story together, or while you’re playing quietly), ask her to tell you a little bit about what’s wrong with school. She may be able to tell you directly, or you may need to set up particular conditions first. Feeling safe, loved, and close is what enables a child to talk to you about difficulties she’s having. You can give her that sense of closeness either by playing with her, vigorously and generously, or by listening closely to her. For instance, if your child has a huge tantrum and you are able to listen all the way through her emotional meltdown and not argue or defend yourself, she may feel close enough to you afterward to volunteer information about some challenge she’s facing.

Your child also may open up if you ask her a positive question first. Someday when you’re dishing out ice cream, or hanging out in the living room playing a board game, or riding in the car with no big agenda, ask her, “If you could make school any way you wanted, how would you make it?” “If you could have anybody you know be your teacher, who would you choose, and why?” “What would you do to make recess the very best it could be?” “If you were in charge of how boys and girls played together, how would you set it up?” You’ll hear about the difficulties, but you’ll have gotten around the hopeless feelings that make a child clam up by asking the question in a positive way.

Sometimes, the incidents that make school difficult don’t happen at school. A child may be upset about being away from you, or may have stored up fears from very early childhood that are making her want to be at home. Children can carry strong feelings from babyhood or toddlerhood, and school may exacerbate an old sense that they’re not safe, or not welcome, or not in charge. Your child may be able to tell you some of this, or you may never know exactly what’s at the root of her difficulty with school.

Try to identify the small triggers that bring on emotional meltdowns for your child. Clearly a big bunch of feelings is in the way of her enjoying the major part of her day. Children will often try to rid themselves of bad feelings by finding a tiny pretext for falling apart. They may say, “I don’t want to wear that shirt to school” or “You put too much milk on my cereal” or “I’m too tired to get out of bed” — and then burst into tears. When your child chooses a pretext for a tantrum or a crying session, let her go to it. Don’t ask her to control her feelings and regain her composure so she can be grown up. We all need a good cry now and then, and a child who is hating school has lots of bad feelings inside that she needs to get out so she’s free to feel differently. It’s as if the bad feelings don’t leave any room for new ones. If a child can cry long and hard, or have huge tantrums while you stay close and loving, the frustration or grief that she feels will loosen its grip on her. She’ll be able to think of new ways to handle things at school, or feel better about herself there, if someone has heard part of the little stockpile of bad feelings she’s carrying.

Wading into a meltdown with your child doesn’t mean that you give in. She’s using your patient firmness as something to hit up against so she can get her feelings out. You don’t give her a second helping of whatever it is you’ve already said no to. You stick to what you said about her needing to brush her teeth. You don’t give in to her demand to sit next to Daddy when it’s her sister’s turn. But you don’t impose your will right away; you just stay with her while she expresses every feeling she can possibly show you. This might go on for half an hour or more, but her functioning will improve dramatically once she’s had a chance to show somebody what a big, awful wad of feelings she’s been carrying. It won’t sound like it’s about school, or even about an older, larger issue in your child’s life. It’ll sound like it’s about brushing teeth or where she sits at the table. But those other issues will begin to clear once she has plenty of chances not just to cry but to go all the way through a tantrum — and then to decide that she’s finished.

It’s not easy to handle these situations. You’ve had a long day, or you’re trying to get to work, or you’re trying to keep everything on schedule so you can do what needs to get done. But children benefit tremendously from having someone get down on one knee and put an arm around them and listen for as long as they can cry. It’s difficult because often what you hear is heartfelt criticism of you: “You’re a bad mommy, and I don’t want to live with you anymore. ” “You’re the worst daddy I ever had.” It can cut very deep when you’re working hard as a parent. But when a child can cry all the way through her feelings and either use you as a target or just rant and rave about things at school, her functioning in school the next day, and with her friends and with you, will be profoundly better. It’s one of the hardest things you can do as a parent, but it’s the fast track toward giving your child a fresh start emotionally and functionally.

You have two tasks. One is to help your child with her feelings. Listening to her talk or cry about the teacher or about some injustice in the classroom will enable her to figure out ways to avoid a bad situation or protect herself. You don’t need to solve every little difficulty she runs up against; let her think about it and come up with new and interesting ways of dealing with it. Your other task is to help your child deal with the damaging things that she does encounter in school, such as classmates who constantly tease or fight, or teachers who belittle or punish children or act irrationally toward them. Work out with your child how and how much she wants you to help; she needs to be an equal partner in deciding what role you play.

I know several parents who’ve met with their child’s teacher and asked if they could help with group dynamics — the boys are teasing the girls, or the girls are rejecting each other (this often hits around 2nd or 3rd grade). If you’re interested in doing that, ask the teacher for half an hour of the class’s time. Tell the children that adults tend to tease children, thinking that it doesn’t hurt their feelings (even though it really does), and then children tease each other and it hurts everyone’s feelings. Then meet with the children in groups of two or three for 15 or 20 minutes and ask them to tell you about a time when they were teased or when a friend of theirs was teased. How did they feel, what did they think, and what did they want to say? What do the children think people should do when they see teasing happening? This can relieve a lot of tension and redirect the group dynamic in a classroom.

Patty Wipfler

Patty Wipfler is the founder and director of the Parents Leadership Institute, a non-profit organization in Palo Alto, California.

Does Your Child Hate School? This is How to Respond

When your child starts to hate school, these strategies are crucial to support your child and ensure the greatest outcome with the school. Here you will find expert tips from parenting experts, a former school principal and university instructor as well as videos from a family therapist.

My five-year-old daughter woke up before the crack of dawn talking all about her friends at school. Her big brown eyes sparkled as she chronicled the events of the day before.

“Did you know that for her birthday Abby got one of those massive LOLs?”
“At school, every day when I write my name I add a heart at the end. That way people know I signed it!”
“During lunch the other day, Lane pushed Charles. Lane got in trouble but I just think he was having a bad day. ”

She went on and on with great enthusiasm.

My daughter was born ready to fly. The day I dropped her off at preschool I used loads of self-talk to keep from crying. I was fearful she’d miss or need me. She was elated to break out on her own. That day, she made her way through the oversized red school doors and didn’t look back at.

It was the first of many days like this.

Kindergarten came and I worried about the duration of the day. Over six hours at school seemed like such a long time for a five-year-old to be away from home. But she came back from school energized recounting stories of her teacher’s outrageous sense of humour and all the names of her BFFs. When her report card came, I poured over two pages that truly captivated who my daughter is. She loved school and was flourishing.

On weekends, she begged to be brought to school. When she was sick, I felt I was held emotionally hostage for keeping her from kindergarten.

She started first grade and it was business as usual for my eager student.

Little did I know we were weeks away from my daughter hating school…

Leading up to the Christmas holidays, my child who never wanted to miss school was asking for days off.

I figured it might be because she was overtired and in need of the two-week break.

But once the holiday was over it started again.

Her stories about school still featured her friends and accomplishments. Now she also describes instances of her teacher yelling and writing names on the chalkboard of kids who didn’t listen with strikes beside their names.

One day, the fateful words I never thought I’d hear came.

“I hate school.”

Even though there had been build-up to this moment, these three words were a punch to my gut. My precocious child had used the worst language she knew to describe how she felt.

I felt paralyzed. I wanted to support her and help solve the issue of hating school. But I didn’t want to intensify the problem by making a mistake. I feared talking to the teacher would only put a target on her back. I didn’t know what to do.

Related reading: Parenting a Strong-Willed Sensitive Child: This is what you need to know

This is how to respond when children hate school.

My mom, a former school principal who currently teaches in the Education Department at a local university, teamed with me to address this issue. Here is our best general advice based on my experience with positive parenting and her decades of educational experience.

Related reading: 11 Things Your Child’s School Principal Would Like You to Know

Listen actively and respond to your child paraphrasing what she has said.

When our children use the word hate to describe someone or something, our knee-jerk reaction tends to be, “No, you don’t.”  When we tell our children how to feel, their feelings become repressed and spill over as anger in other areas. Authors of How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & How to Listen so Kids Will Talk, Faber and Mazlish say the best course of action is to address even the harshest of words with empathy.

Avoid responses that repress like:

• “But you’ve always loved school,”
• “You’ll get over it,”
• “All your friends are there,” or
• “Don’t say hate.”

Instead, respond with understanding. This will help your child sort through his feelings faster. Examples include:

• “I can tell you’re really upset. This is hard.”
• “This must be frustrating. Can you tell me more?”or
• “You must have really felt ___, when___.”

Listen until your child has fully expressed herself. Ask your child to draw or journal how she is feeling to get the release she needs and to give you a better understanding of how she feels.

Not only will she be able to get release from any emotions she has pent up, but you will also likely gain insights into the root of the issue.

Related reading: 5 tips for finding balance during crisis schooling and navigating our new normal

Encourage your child to journal, colour, or draw his or her feelings about school. This provides emotional release and can give you insight into his or her feelings

Try the magic want technique.

I learned this in counselling at university and it can work wonders for problem-solving. After you have listened to your child express his concerns, anger and fears. First, empathize. Then, ask him, if he had a magic wand to make going to and being at school better, what would he do? He may choose to fix friendships, have a better relationship with his teacher, or it could be something simple that makes him feel empowered.

When my son started crying when it was time to go to school, we used this technique. His magic wand request was that I woke up with him (I usually stayed in bed from when he woke at 6:30 until just after 7:00 a. m.). He also asked that my husband or I pack his backpack. Just these differences alone stopped months’ worth of crying.

Read: After School Meltdowns: Why they happen and what you can do about them

If you suspect the issue is separation anxiety or generalized anxiety, avoid giving days off.

Though a day off can provide a necessary reprieve, it can also create a negative feedback loop. If the child wants to avoid school, a day off with feed the desire to be away more. The one thing anxiety loves is avoidance. And, if the child has anxiety associated with school, missing school will essentially feed the anxiety and allow it to grow bigger.

Don’t fan the flames.

Stay positive when you express your opinions about the school and the teacher.

Empathy gives license for all of your child’s negative emotions to come to the forefront. But we do this so that we can address the child’s feelings so that they don’t build up and become worse. Empathy should not be mistaken for adding fuel to the fire. In the case of empathy, the parent is acknowledging only what the child has said in different words. For instance, Child: “I hate school.” Parent: “You’re really angry. It’s hard.”

In contrast, fanning the flames would be the child saying, “I hate school.” And the parent responding with, “I saw how rude your teacher was at the pumpkin patch. I don’t like her either.”

We must stay as positive as possible so our children feel empowered to handle their day-to-day interactions at school as best they can.

Read: Reframe your child’s mistakes as opportunities for mastery

Arrange an in-person meeting with the teacher to address your concerns.

Email is great for little details or arranging the meeting. However, tone can easily be misconstrued and email tends to prompt a lot of back and forth. Set up a face-to-face meeting with the teacher.

When meeting with the teacher, remember that while your child’s perceptions are completely valid, they are lacking context. Assume the best of the teacher and ask questions to generate a better understanding of what’s going on. Approach the meeting with the intention of working as a team for the best outcome. This teacher will likely be your child’s teacher until the end of the year. Giving the teacher the benefit of the doubt will make a resolution easier.

Talk to the principal.

In general, this should come after meeting face-to-face with the teacher. It may seem easier to avoid talking to the teacher about an issue in his class. However, most principals will ask that you meet with the teacher first. That said, this may not be possible based on what is happening with your child at school.

Meeting with the principal is where options such as switching classes can be discussed as well as more comprehensive solutions.

Fortunately, for us, this was the pivotal point. We arranged to meet with the vice principal and came up with a plan that suited our family and, most importantly, our daughter. Through this meeting, the vice principal was also able to better understand the issues in our daughter’s class and was better equipped to deal with them.

Read books about adversity and changing perspectives.

Stories help children generate a better understanding of their feelings and also make solutions seem more tangible.

Here are some recommended titles for grappling with not wanting to go to school.

I Don’t Want to Go to School by A.J. Cosmo

The Juice Box Bully: Empowering Kids to Stand Up to Others by Bob Sorenson

The Girl Who Hated Books by Manjusha Pawagi

I Just Don’t Like the Sound of No by Julia Cook

Train Your Angry Dragon: Teach Your Dragon to be Patient by Steve Herman

The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn

There’s hope.

A child’s impression of school can last a lifetime. And, as such, it is so important that children love to learn. If you suspect your child is being mistreated or struggling with school in any way, arrange meetings to generate a better understanding of what is going on. Each family is unique and each child’s needs are different, no matter what you know what’s best for your child.

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For more great resources like this, check out:

Reframe your child’s mistakes as opportunities for mastery

Parenting a Strong-Willed Sensitive Child: This is what you need to know

The Yes Brain Child: How to Cultivate Curiosity, Courage and Resilience in Your Child

After School Meltdowns: Why they happen and what you can do about them

10 Things Your Child’s School Principal Would Like You to Know

School Principal Says Follow These 10 Tips for a Successful Start to Kindergarten

My Child Hates School And I’m Tired Of Fighting It

My child hates school, and I’m tired of fighting it. When summer is officially over, backpacks and school supplies are bought, and the drop-off/pick-up line is already a mess, the anticipation begins.

As excited as I was for my daughter to start first grade, I dreaded what the school year might bring because my daughter despises school.

Already, I know what is coming. And I know I’m not the only parent fearing the school year.

For many parents, with school comes daily struggles of dealing with kids waking up, getting dressed, and getting out the door in the morning.

Not to mention the hours wasted on homework that should have taken five minutes. I have nightmares of Common Core math.

My daughter throws fits and I get so frustrated with her that I give up more often than I should.

She has been going to some sort of “school” since she was about eight months old. It’s hard for parents to let go at such a young age, but there is always the hope that being in school at an early age will encourage your kid to want to excel and love to learn.

When my daughter was in preschool, I started to see that she was not enjoying the learning aspect of school.

Even in preschool, they would conduct tests on the kids to see where they were in terms of going into kindergarten. You would think your child should be worrying about which friends to play with and not what test score they got.

One day I picked up my daughter from preschool and her face was red and she had tears in her eyes. I asked her what happened and she told me in her tiny voice that she didn’t get it.

She had trouble counting and pronouncing words correctly. I knew this and did my best to help but wanted to be optimistic for my daughter.

“Well you’re going to get it!” I told her.

But my heart shattered in a million pieces. She was too young to already feel insecure about herself.

My excitement about my daughter being in school then turned into dread and anxiousness.

As a parent with a child who doesn’t like school, there is always those first thoughts in the morning of, “Will she be okay in school today?” and “What battle do we face today?”

This whole school process is a new experience for both of us. My daughter is my one and only child and I have no idea how to tackle this as a mom.

I loved going to school as a kid and I want my daughter to love school just as much.

She can learn so much, especially about herself, and meet lifelong friends.

I remember being a mess on my daughter’s first day of kindergarten because my little butterfly was spreading her wings and officially on her own.

But then the following week came the eight-letter word many parents dread: homework. Who knew kindergartners had homework? That word makes sweat instantly accumulate on my forehead.

And homework was the biggest hurdle with school. Many times, my daughter would look at a page in her homework packet and just stare.

Then one day, it clicked for me as a mom.

“Didn’t your teacher go over this in class with you?” I asked her.

“Yeah, but I just don’t remember,” she said as her eyes swelled up with tears.

She was overwhelmed and at that moment my eyes filled with tears as well. I gave my daughter a hug and told her I am always here to help her. We took a break from homework and were able to finish it later.

That day, it wasn’t worth the fight.

As a parent, I think all you can do is encourage your child and say it’s okay to be frustrated.

Children are learning not only about education, but also just dealing with basic life skills like tying their shoes and making their bed. It can be a lot to process and take in.

Kids need to feel supported by their parents and told to keep trying. And that’s what I continue to do with my daughter because that is what she needs the most.

I find encouragement when I talk with other parents about their own struggles with their kids and school. The kids not wanting to wake up and coming home upset about a friend not wanting to play. It helps to find people who can relate and talk to about it.

My child hates school and we have a long road ahead of us when it comes to school.

I want her to go to college and get a degree, like I did. I want her to have endless opportunities, meet fascinating people, and find what gets her creative juices flowing.

Parents have the toughest job in the world. They have to keep their kids happy and safe at all times, at least that’s what they strive for. School is just another journey in which you will learn new things about your kid and yourself.

So far, I’ve learned my daughter and I will always be learning, whether it’s about school or ourselves, but ultimately it will make our bond stronger.

The whining about getting up early, begging not to go school, and arguments about homework will most likely always happen. But for the sake of our kids, all parents can do is hang in there and give it our best, just like we expect our kids to.

One school day at a time.

Help! My Child Hates School!

There is almost nothing more challenging about parenting during the school-age years than a child who hates school. When the school is not a good fit for your child, it colors almost everything about daily life together. Navigating the school system with a child who has learning challenges, a history of exposure to trauma, or prenatal exposures can be overwhelming, defeating, and exhausting to the bone. When you have a child who hates school, you feel the weight of their future world is squarely on your shoulders. Your worries keep you up at night, and trust us when we say that you are not alone in your anxiety!

Middle of the Night Worries

• How will I help my child get the best education possible?
• What exactly is the best education for this child?
• Will my child ever make friends and learn social skills?
• Would medication be the magic pill that will make all these problems disappear?
• Is it just me, or does this teacher seem not to like my kid? Does this mean I need to change the classroom assignment?
• What should I do about standardized testing? Even if this kid can sit for the testing period, I’m pretty sure my child will not pass any of them!
• Will my child get into college? Is college even the best option for my child? Should I start researching trade schools?
• Is my child ever going to launch successfully to adulthood? Will she be living in my basement and eating out of my fridge for the rest of her life?
• What is a realistic expectation for this child’s ability to support himself?
• And speaking of being realistic — am I being unrealistic about what I expect the school to do to support my child?
• Will my child be beaten down by the system that is supposed to prepare him for his future? Will I make it through his school experience?

Do a Brain Dump in Your Journal

Do these spiraling worries sound familiar? What do you do when the fear and worry about your child’s fear, anxiety, and utter distaste for school take over your brain? One helpful tool for managing this level of stress and anxiety in our parenting hearts is to journal.

Write it all out – brainstorm fashion, and don’t censor yourself.

Then put it away until you are in a better mental space and re-read what you wrote. Were your fears realistic? Take them one by one and journal some answers to the questions you were spewing. Apply truth to those which were lies or fear-based exaggerations.

For example, “Yes, my child will launch successfully into adulthood – he might not go to college, but he will find the path that is right for him. We will support him as he learns and grows into that niche.”

Identify in your journal which of your spiraling worries are unrealistic and respond with a more realistic, “light of day” thought.

For example, it’s unrealistic to assume that your child will be living in your basement forever, eating your food every day for the rest of your life or his. He’s only eight and just had a rough third-grade week in 3^rd grade.

Instead, tell yourself that if someday your child is unable to live independently – for whatever reason – you will teach him the life skills he needs to shop for his own food and make his meals. But right now, he’s only in 3^rd grade, and sometimes third-graders regress. Sometimes, we all regress!

The Legacy of Trauma is an Invisible Disability

Some families face a range of learning differences or disabilities. Other families are dealing with behavioral challenges. Frankly, when you have a child who struggles academically, it’s rarely implied that if you just tried harder or parented differently, your child’s academic challenges would disappear. Parents who are managing behavioral issues are not quite that lucky.

Many parents of a child who has experienced abuse, neglect, trauma, or prenatal exposure will face judgment, resistance, and lack of compassion from the child’s educational team. Teachers and educational intervention specialists might assume your child is unwilling to fit into the system or unwilling to behave appropriately. The fact is that your child might be unable to conform to the expectations of the classroom.

Parents raising children exposed to trauma understand that the difference between unwilling and unable is enormous. However, a teacher might not know that yet and instead assume that your parenting is lacking or too soft. The legacy of our children’s trauma becomes an invisible disability that is disheartening for us and demoralizing for our kids.

How to Raise a Child Who Will Thrive, a FREE course!

Prioritize Your Family Relationship Over School Success

Most five-year-olds love everything about school. They love their teachers, backpacks, lunch boxes, and friends. For many kids, this changes as they experience increasing frustration, failure, or challenges in the classroom.

After all, a child can only face so much failure before they start feeling stupid and incapable. You can see her becoming resistant to school and learning. He turns a 15-minute homework assignment into a 2-hour battle. He drags his feet getting ready for school, starting the day with so much dysregulation and making everyone late. It’s enough to break your heart. Truthfully, it’s enough to break your spirit – you know they are feeling the same way.

When you face these levels of brokenness and stress around your child’s school experience, it’s time to bottom-line it for yourselves. Family relationships come first. Attachment and connection are the priority, and helping your child feel safe with you and in your home is at the top of your list.

How Do You Do That?

Practically speaking, the first thing you can do to implement this priority of Family First is to contact the school and let them know you are struggling. Outline your game plan for them. Here are a couple of suggestions for what to consider in your game plan:

• We won’t be doing homework for the rest of this marking period.
• When he gets home from school, we are going to (take a nap, ride bikes, play with Legos, whatever refuels you both).
• Please don’t mark his behavior on any charts. You can send me an email if we should address a specific behavior. Otherwise, don’t include him in the clip chart system.
• Can we arrange some additional support for math class for the rest of this marking period? We won’t be doing math homework anymore. It’s far too stressful for us both.

Find out what you both need to reduce your child’s anxiety about school and do it! Make home a safe space by implementing your plans in a predictable, consistent routine. Spend your time together playing games, listening to his favorite music, or baking. Focus on connection with the precious spirit that his perceived classroom failures trampled.

Be Willing to Re-Evaluate Your School Options

Experienced parents who bear battle scars from fighting the school systems for their kids will tell you that you have many options for a healthy school experience.

One suggestion is to evaluate yearly what the options are where you live. What do the various schools around you offer that will benefit your child? What would be a “red flag” in the public school but maybe manageable in the charter school down the road? How can you cobble together the best option this year for this child? Sometimes, you will have to re-evaluate mid-year, and that is okay. Release yourself from the expectation that your child must finish the year where he started.

The options for schooling have increased dramatically in recent years, and online instruction is another valid consideration. There are also great resources for homeschooling – you don’t have to be a certified teacher to supervise your child’s education adequately! Check your state regulations to get a complete sense of requirements and resources.

Championing Your Child Builds Life Skills

School challenges can be all-encompassing and threaten to take over our lives. However, we can shore up our child’s life skills when we work with her to identify the issues and plan to tackle them together. We will send our kids affirming messages of our family values, her inherent preciousness, and value in the family when we come alongside her to do so. What more attaching and connecting practice can you offer your child than telling her you are with her in this and that you will always have her best interest in mind as you parent her?!

How have you helped your child during a season in which they hated school? Tell us about it in the comments!

Image Credits: Elizabeth Albert; Andrea Piacquadio; cottonbro

What to Do When Your Child Hates School

If your child hates school, it is probably not his fault, nor that of his teacher, but rather it can be evidence that his brain is functioning appropriately.

Healthy brains protect their owners from perceived threat. School today is stressful, often threatening, as a result of the high-stakes standardized testing that challenges students, teachers, and school administrators. There is so much information mandated as required “knowledge” for these tests (that determine federal funding), that for many children, school seems more like a feedlot force-feeding them facts without adequate time or resources to make them interesting or relevant.

Overstuffed Curriculum

Without the projects and group activities — to say nothing of the elimination of art, music, P.E., and often elementary school science, social studies, and even recess — why should a child want to be there? These classes and many enjoyable activities have been sacrificed so there is more time for the two subjects that are evaluated on those tests — math and English.

Fortunately, there are many wonderful, creative, and dedicated teachers, consultants, and administrators on the front line every day doing all they can to engage their students. Without them, I cannot imagine how much worse things would be for the children in their charge.

The problem is worst when the district is required to stick to a rigid “teacher-proof” curriculum that dictates tedious days of worksheets and nights of the same brain stuffing. In these cases, the best teachers have less opportunity to use their skills to create the joyful, memorable learning experiences children need.

The penalty for all of us is that the dropout rate has never been higher. For today’s high schoolers, it is more likely that their parents will have graduated than it is that the students themselves will graduate high school. When surveyed as to the reason for the dropping out, the overwhelming cry is BOREDOM. When asked what constitutes boredom, the two major responses are: “The material isn’t interesting” and “What we are taught has no relevance to me.”

From my perspective as a neurologist and classroom teacher, I see blank faces, “acting out,” and zoning out, and I know that these are not the children’s choices. The brain evolved as an organ to promote survival of the animal and the species. Its first priority is to avoid danger. Our attention is hard-wired to alert to signals of potential danger. The most primitive parts of the brain are those that determine what gets our attention and what information gets priority entry into the brain.

This attention system is essentially the same in humans as in other mammals. When the brain experiences stress, that attention system is on autopilot, seeking out the potential threat that might be causing the emotional disturbance, while ignoring other sensory information, such as lessons.

Stress goes up with boredom and frustration in humans and animals. Animals restrained or understimulated “misbehave” with aggressive, destructive, and even self-mutilating behavior. The stress causes their brains to attend only to imagined or real threat. In that state, behavior is no longer influenced by the higher, thinking brain. Stress takes control of the neural pathways that determine where information is processed and where behavior is controlled.

The same responses take place in the human brain. If children are stressed by boring lessons that have little personal relevance, or by the frustration of not keeping up with the overloaded curriculum, their brains do what they are programmed to do: Input is diverted away from the thinking, higher brain (the prefrontal cortex) and sent to the lower, reactive brain. In this situation, in humans as in animals, the involuntary behavioral reactions are essentially limited to three responses: fight, flight, or freeze.

The reason I left my neurology practice and became a teacher was because I had a profound increase in the children referred to my practice by teachers who suspected they had attention or other neurological disorders that caused them to “act out” or “zone out” in class.

When I observed the joyless force-feeding of facts by teachers who were given the impossible task of cramming test material into these young brains, my heart went out both the students and their teachers. I joined their ranks, and made correlations between the neuroscience research about stress, attention, behavior, and memory. I spent 10 years in my classrooms implementing strategies to promote the neuroscience of joyful learning.

Parents Need to Be Brain Preservers

Your challenge as a parent is to reconnect your children with the joy of learning. You can make a difference in how they relate to school and even reverse their brains’ reflexive reactions. The key is to build bridges.

You can reduce your child’s automatic reaction to the boredom and frustration of school and homework by linking your children’s positive emotions to their one-size-fits-all classrooms. You can enrich and expand your children’s learning experiences and help them be more successful on tests and other school assessments. More importantly, you can revive the love of learning and discovery that was present when they started kindergarten.

How to Build the Bridges for Your Child’s Safe Passage Across Troubled Waters

The intervention you can provide is to connect your children’s classroom studies to their interests. Help them the find personal relevance that busts the stress and opens up the neural pathways to their upper, intelligent brains, where true learning and creative thinking take place.

You can use strategies with your children at home to reverse school negativity and promote the mindset your children need to regain in order to sustain a positive attitude about themselves and school. With this outlook and reversal of negativity, their brains will be more receptive to attentive focus and memory making, both during class and homework time.

The success your children will see from their effort will promote new neural pathways, helping them to respond to learning more efficiently. They’ll also more efficiently store what they learn in their long-term and memory. Finally, they will retrieve the information not only for the test, but for the challenges and opportunities that await them in the 21st century.

The key to this process is to connect your children to what they learn at school through their interests and past positive experiences, so they will WANT to learn what they HAVE to learn.

Looking Inside the Brain

Neuroimaging studies reveal the real-time metabolic and structural changes in the brain that occur when newly learned information is retained in memory storage areas. We know from these studies that memory storage activity pumps up when the new information is related to prior knowledge, personal interest, and positive emotional experiences.

Similarly, each time your children focus their attention, this activates their neural pathways for alerting and focusing, making those neural circuits stronger. As a result, it increases their ability to pay attention and focus. Most certainly, they’ll need this strengthening of attentive focus if they are to learn from lengthy and tedious time spent on drill-and-kill activities at school. Little mental energy may be left when they come home and are required to do more repetitive drill work, especially with the lure of their video games, laptops, social networking, and television.

Practicing these processes of active learning for long-term memory is like exercising a muscle. The neuronal circuits involved become more developed because of their repeated activation through the process of neuroplasticity.

Each time a memory is activated — especially when one memory network is activated in connection with another, related memory circuit — the networks become stronger, more accurate and extensive. Repeated linking of related memories with new learning is like brain glue. The new information increasingly grows more linking connections (dendrites, synapses) every time the new and prior memory are used together for a new purpose.

An example would be activating the memory of family camping trips to link with the new learning about the settlers traveling across the country in covered wagons. When you help your children link the new learning about the settlers with that long-term stored memory of family camping trips, the school-based social studies lessons grow more dendrites that carry information between neurons that hold the memories. Now, the neuroplasticity links are like mental Velcro. When your children want to remember facts about the social studies lesson for a test, recalling the camping trips retrieves the associated information they need to answer the test questions.

Brains Keep Track of Effort that Does or Doesn’t Pay Off

It helps motivate children to exert effort when they believe it will pay off. Why? The brain evolved for survival. Survival is served when the brain evaluates the likelihood that effort will produce a payoff. The brain is wired to remember the outcome each time it evaluates a situation (challenging test question, confrontation by a classmate, choice of studying or playing, decision to pay attention to a lecture, whether to try out for a team) and predicts whether effort will pay off.

There is a special structure in the brain where its only job is to squirt pleasure-evoking dopamine into the prefrontal cortex (the place where past memories are activated to make the prediction) when a prediction (i.e., choice, answer, social response, decision to put in physical effort, prediction that doing homework is a better choice than playing) is found to be accurate.

This accumulated information about the predictions made and the results, is used by the brain in animals and humans, to evaluate new, similar situations when effort is called for. A fox that tried chasing a rabbit up a steep hill, exerting effort and using valuable energy stores in the chase, only to be outrun by the rabbit, keeps a memory of that prediction. The fox builds a memory network that the effort exerted failed to produce the predicted result. A few more such failed attempts, and the fox’s brain builds a more and more accurate memory network to better survive. It now uses that network to predict whether to exert effort based on previous experience relative to the steepness of the hill and distance from the prey. The fox now will not extend effort if this network predicts that chasing the rabbit up a steep hill is unlikely to be successful.

When children’s brains develop school negativity, it is usually the result of the effort-preserving mindsets constructed by unsuccessful prior efforts. Through a past history of failed efforts — past efforts to sustain attention in class, do homework carefully, persevere at challenging classwork — that did not result in success, children’s brains learn to automatically resist putting mental effort into subsequent similar activities.

Children who are quite intelligent can have difficulty with rote memorization. Yet, since that memorization is what is tested and therefore perceived by students as valuable, they develop the belief that their failure to sustain attention in class or to get high grades on rote memory tests means they are unintelligent and don’t have the ability to succeed. That mindset is not only inaccurate, but when taken on by your child, means the positive effort-to-goal neural patterning becomes more difficult develop.

Preheat Your Child’s Memory Networks

Connect their brains to the topics they will be studying at school by looking at photos or videos of family trips, objects they own that were made in countries they study, or reading favorite stories that relate to topics in science, history, and math. The curiosity prompted by your reminders of their past experiences and current interests is a brain bridge ready to link with the information they must learn for school. The Velcro is now waiting in their brains, and their neural circuits are prepared to grow the dendrites that will physically link the new information with their permanent memory circuits. Additionally, they now have the interest and positive mindset to WANT to know what they HAVE to learn!

Also, you’ll further preheat the memory links to connect their interest to school work when you ask your children questions that help them personally connect these stories, past experiences, possessions, or their interests to the current or upcoming school topics. Stimulate curiosity in your children so they want to discover answers and solve problems. Their brains remain attentive because they are personally interested in the answer to the question.

Stimulate curiosity in your children related to school topics, and then work with them as they learn how to discover answers to their curiosity-motivated questions. You will not only be increasing positive school topic connections, but also help them develop critical thinking skills and other frontal lobe executive functions as they analyze information (from their memories, books, the internet, and from you) to answer their questions.

Their brains are attentive because their curiosity generated their question. As they learn to focus attention on and evaluate which information is pertinent to answer their questions, they build their highest thinking skills such as analyzing, organizing, and prioritizing.

Thanks to your connecting school topics with their interest by engaging their curiosity, their brains get a jump start on information processing skills that will promote success in academic, social and emotional challenges and opportunities throughout their lives. When children are motivated by curiosity and interest to ask and then find answers to questions, their brains build skills of prediction, deduction, expanded thinking, analysis, and the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, make judgments, and support their own opinions or ethical beliefs. These are rather nifty side benefits from promoting your child’s curiosity about school topics and reducing school negativity.

Preparing to Be a Brain Coach

You may need the curriculum in advance from your child’s teacher, but more likely, the teacher will be required to follow the textbook in a strictly sequential manner. As long as you know what material will be studied in the next class unit, you can find ways to bring it into active discussions at home, in the car, or while waiting on line at the grocery checkout.

You might want to have a handy note card with a supply of open-ended questions that are good bridges to link your children’s interests to many topics. These can be cues for how to relate things you experience together to school topics.

If your child is interested in sports, a question on your list might be, “If you were the coach of a […] team how would you use […] to help your team win?” The first blank would be their favorite sport or name of a favorite team. The second blank would be the related school topic (gravity, averaging, multiplying, vocabulary words, inventions, or qualities evident in characters from their school literature books).

If you children learned about taxation without representation in American history or percentages in math, you can show them the grocery bill and ask their opinion of the tax added to the total. How was the number calculated? Can they estimate what percent of the total bill the tax represents? Is it fair to have tax?

If you child likes skateboarding and the city council voted down the proposed skateboard park, there is the opening to discuss if the decision was fair. How does the current system work? How do these council members represent what you want? Should children vote? Should people who pay more taxes have more say in how tax money is spent? All of these questions can be linked to topics in history such as the Revolutionary War (taxation without representation), the Civil War, poll taxes, voting rights for former slaves and women-which came first and why?

Discussions you promote to bridge your children to their school work will serve as stronger memory cement if you are an active, attentive listener when they express their ideas or ask questions. This is not the time to split your focus. To keep them motivated, your children need to know you are truly interested in their ideas and opinions.

Negativity Turns to Motivation

The knowledge gained from brain research, when applied to learning, can help you energize and enliven your children’s minds. You can help them build life skills such as improved memory, focus, organization, and goal setting. Using your knowledge of your children’s interests, past enjoyable experiences, and learning strengths to bridge their interest to school subjects will result in their improved attitudes, motivation, perseverance, and ultimately their increased confidence that their efforts will pay off.

Your interventions will help your children avoid the learning turn off to the challenges of today’s fact-heavy, meaning-light curriculum. You will help them construct the brain circuits to become lifelong learners who can transfer and apply what they learn to real-world situations.

The results will more than offset your planning and preparations. Smiles will replace groans and eye-rolls when you use neuroscience to return the joys of learning to your children.

What To Say & Do When Your Child Is Unhappy At School

Compulsory schooling in almost every state goes until age 16. That means that for 12 years it’s expected a child will show up and get an education. But no one said they had to be happy about it. The hard truth is that there are days when school might feel like a drag. But what should you do when your kid says they hate school?

There’s no one answer. Each child’s school experience is different and each child will have their own reactions to the classroom, says practicing psychologist Mary Karapetian Alvord, Ph.D., especially given the current climate.

“We’ve had a year and a half of constant uncertainty, constant changes, that’s why we’ve seen anxiety rates and depression rates go up,” Dr. Alvord says. And the reasoning behind why a child is saying they hate school could be myriad.

Reasons Why A Child Might Say They Hate School

Dr. Alvord says that if you hear a child say they hate school you need to recognize that any number of things could be going on.

“There are legitimate worries that kids have, especially now if they’re going to a new school. There’s just so many changes and always new schools have been sort of difficult to adjust to,” says Dr. Robin Gurwich, a faculty member in the Duke University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Child and Family Health. Even if a child is at the same school they attended the year prior, returning from a distance learning situation or even hybrid model might rattle a student regardless of what grade they’re in.

“If they’re not sure what to do during recess or they’re having a lot of trouble with transitions in high school, it’s very stressful. Sometimes I hear middle schoolers say ‘What if I can’t get into my locker in time and I’m going to miss class?’” Gurwitch says.

Fears of attending school can be as simple as a forgotten locker combination and as large as a reaction to racial injustice, lack of school diversity, and bullying.

How to Navigate School Anxiety

The way parents address “hatred of school” will vary by age. Therefore a parent’s reaction should adjust accordingly.

Pre-K Children

For little children, a hatred of school might come from a year spent at home. “They’ve been at home with Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, whoever their caregiver is, and so it may not be so much they hate school as it is ‘I really don’t want to leave you,’” says Dr. Gurwitch. “For those children, it may be a feeling of ‘this is where I’m comfortable in our safe little nest.’”

“It’s not necessarily ‘I hate school.’ It’s ‘I don’t want to be away from you,’” adds Dr. Gurwitch.

Elementary School Children

Elementary school children could be having similar feelings of separation anxiety as well. And if they have strong verbal skills, Alvord says parents might hear something she calls catastrophic thinking or “catastrophizing.” This is where children (and let’s be honest, sometimes adults) manufacture the worst possible scenarios in their minds until the situation feels unbearable.

For instance, a child might think “I hate school because what if I can’t find the bathroom in time and I wet my pants and you forget to pack me a change of clothes and I have to sit in my wet clothes and you can’t leave work so I have to wait all day” etc, etc.

At the same time, Alvord has seen anxiety manifest from undiagnosed learning issues. “That makes school hard,” says Dr. Alvord, who had a patient who was considered lazy in school until she discovered that he actually couldn’t see the board and just needed glasses.

Middle School Children

Middle school is a time, Dr. Alvord says, when worries associated with school generally become peer related. “Kids may feel like they’re not that liked or they don’t have enough friends or maybe they don’t have a really close buddy,” says Dr. Alvord. Worry about how other kids might act or concerns about bullying can play a role too.

High School Children

In high school, the stressors grow. Alvord says parents should explore with their teen worries about workload, friendships, peer pressure, and concerns about the future.

Juanmonino/E+/Getty Images

What Signs to Look for

If a child says “I hate school” that can actually be helpful, says Dr. Alvord because it opens the door for a conversation with a parent, counselor, or adult. But not all children will speak up, and that’s why Gurwitch and Alvord encourage parents, family members, and guardians to keep an eye on children’s behaviors.

“Significant signs of distress, stress, or worry,” are what to look for in a child, says Dr. Gurwitch. These can manifest in a variety of ways like a sudden disinterest in school-related activities, attaching worry to other things, like a fear of a monster under the bed, or big changes in behavior and sleep.

How to Talk to Your Child about School

The good news for parents is that both Dr. Alvord and Dr. Gurwitch say talking to your child is the first step to overcome their “I hate school” mindset.

“It’s listening, it’s being warm, and then it’s problem solving,” says Dr. Gurwitch. Normalizing feelings is important here too.

“Anger is fine. It’s not fine to, like, throw the chairs over. But feeling of anger often give us a sense that something is dangerous or not going well,” says Dr. Alvord. She says that helping children understand that having emotions is OK can be a motivator to start a discussion on stress or worry. Explaining to a child that “Anxiety can help motivate us to study and do things. But too much anxiety is paralyzing,” can help them understand they need ways to manage stress.

From there, a parent can move the conversation to the matter at hand, remembering always, as Dr. Gurwitch says, that “our job as parents is to enable independence. ”

That means helping a child find ways to overcome their hatred of school. For instance, “When you’re exploring with kids, find out what they like about school,” says Dr. Gurwitch. “I have kids who come in and they say, ‘I hate school. I don’t like anything about it.’ I’m like, well, what about lunch? Now, some of them don’t like it because if they don’t have a friend and it can be very painful. So you say well, what are their options? Maybe the school has something called a lunch bunch where different kids are sat together at lunch to make new friends. Maybe they can try that.”

The idea is to help children see the forest for the trees and gather some perspective about their situation. Finding positive solutions and directing the conversation to things a child can admit they do enjoy about school will help them focus on the positive.

What Gurwitch cautions parents against is giving in to a child’s demands to not attend school. That can lead to avoidance and withdrawal, she says. “Parents need to remember that they are there for the greater good of their child,” Dr. Gurwitch explains. “A child has to understand that avoiding the situation or avoiding the problems doesn’t make them go away.”

For younger children, sometimes anxiety manifests from lack of structure. Talking about what’s going to happen before, during, and after school each day can be reassuring. For instance, Gurwitch says a parent can say, “We’re going to drop you off at school this morning, then you’ll have reading and math in class and then recess. Won’t that be fun on the playground? After school I’ll be there to pick you up and we’ll go home and let you choose a snack, then rest, then we’ll go outside and play.”

For middle school and high school students, however, support will look different. “For teens and even the middle schoolers, ask ‘What clubs do you like? What clubs are possibilities? So maybe school isn’t so great, but you can look forward to theater or chess club or sport or extracurricular activity,’ because not everyone is geared to be an academic and that’s OK,” says Dr. Alvord.

Helping older students find their place where they fit in can make a huge difference in their feelings about school. Rather than only reflecting on what makes school bad, redirect the conversation to fun opportunities they can take advantage of.

How to Support Your Child

The “I hate school” conversation is not a fun one, but Dr. Alvord and Dr. Gurwitch agree that it’s essential to have. And if your child doesn’t feel comfortable opening up to you or a partner, give them the tools to find someone else to speak to.

“Counselors are just incredible resources,” says Dr. Alvord. But they’re not the only people who can help a child overcome school anxiety. “You might find a teacher that they could relate to or a coach or some adult maybe outside the family. And I’m not even talking professionally. Sometimes it’s someone at church or a synagogue or something, maybe a youth leader.” That said, Alvord adds that if your child is showing really significant distress you need to talk to your pediatrician and maybe get a mental health consultation.

Experts

Dr. Robin Gurwitch, psychologist and faculty member in the Duke University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Child and Family Health

Dr. Mary Karapetian Alvord, Ph.D., practicing psychologist, Adj. Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and author of Resilience Builder Program for Children and Adolescents (Research Press); adn Conquer Negative Thinking for Teens: A Workbook to Break the Nine Thought Habits That Are Holding You Back (New Harbinger)

If a child hates school: who is to blame and what to do

The school constantly accuses me that my child is reluctant to go to school. But I still don’t understand what is my fault here. Until quite recently, this was not the case. I am trying to find ways out of this situation, but until recently, the dialogue was reluctant at school and seemed not to hear the parents at all.

When I was a schoolgirl myself, I was not like most of my classmates. Usually, after the holidays, the teacher asked the question: “Which of you missed school?” I raised my hand alone or no one raised it.

I didn’t want to feel like a black sheep. I was bored on holidays (except for summer holidays). During the seasonal holidays, I missed the bustle of school, communication with friends and teachers, most of whom I loved very much. And it seemed strange to me that someone could not miss all this. Probably, the guys had a busy life, since it is more interesting for them outside of school. I, up to the 9th grade, had a busy life (I lived then in the village and communicated besides school only with a neighbor) I could not boast. And today, when I remember my school years, my teachers, I have a feeling of awe for those times, because I really felt comfortable and interesting at school.

My daughter used to study and go to school with pleasure. Up to 8th grade. The first parent meeting immediately made it clear to me that the year would not be easy, because already now everyone is set to successfully pass the exam, preparation begins, and these are double loads. I understood that my daughter in the 8th grade was not at all in the mood for this. She is now more interested in her friends and her dog than in the OGE at the end of grade 9. Every month since the beginning of the school year, the pressure from the school has increased. The daughter began to complain of headaches and periodic tantrums about the school, unwillingness to go there at all.

I went to the school for reconnaissance, they had an instructive conversation with me, explaining that my daughter was “rolling down”, that urgent measures were needed from the family, the seizure of some important things for her and complete control. I was confused and frustrated. I thought that maybe, indeed, we have too democratic relations with our daughter and it is worth becoming a little tougher.

It did not lead to good things. Every day I went into the electronic diary, in which incomprehensible deuces appeared on weekends, which were not there last week. Most often, the daughter did not understand why she received unsatisfactory grades. My daughter began to tell such details about the school that made the hair on my head stand on end. I could only be surprised with my mouth open and hug my daughter, convincing her of the teachers’ assurances that “their class is the worst” and that “they are all stupid, and, of course, they won’t pass the OGE.”

The conversation with the school was unproductive, I only heard accusations against me that “I am a bad mother and do not take care of my child” wants to prove to anyone at school that she is not a camel.” She knows that she needs to go through these difficulties in order to become stronger herself. The question of changing schools was raised, but after studying a number of schools, we realized that this would be a pointless undertaking. I want to find a school that will face the child. A school that will not retaliate for an independent and independent decision to study the way it turns out, without extra stress for her today, for which she was psychologically not yet ready. A school that will be friendly to children. We have not yet found such a school in our area, but I really want to believe that our school will take this path.

Believe me, I have reason to believe it was my daughter, and not the school, because I myself worked at the school and saw all the horrors that my daughter is talking about. I saw how teachers do not respect the boundaries of another person, and even more so a child, and in front of the whole class they can scold him, discuss his family, call names and draw conclusions about a student of an impartial character. I saw how teachers accuse children of not respecting them and therefore make a decision at every lesson to sort things out with children.

Respect must be earned, not begged for

I don’t want to blame all the teachers in any way. There are worthy people in this profession. And most of my teachers were just like that, I really admire them to this day, and I wrote about them on the eve of Teacher’s Day on my pages on social networks. Someday, in this blog, I will definitely write about outstanding, in my opinion, teachers. I was lucky in my life that I had most of them. And none of them have ever raised their voice to a child in my presence.

Today, teachers often complain that “children are different now”, so they supposedly deserve such treatment. I don’t think so

Today it is rare to find a truly intelligent teacher who behaves at the proper level. Some of the teachers, by the way, who teach subjects to my daughter were also mine. So those same teachers, highly respected by me, continue to behave properly today. There are no complaints in their direction. And I’m glad that my daughter has the opportunity to attend their lessons – it means that not everything is lost. All hope is that she will focus on these wonderful people.

So, after all, it’s not about children, with whom teachers today cannot cope with a respectful attitude towards them. But still, in teachers, who, perhaps, turned out to be not their profession.

I always told children that respect for any other person is the norm of your upbringing, and respect is your own business did not behave. I do not demand respect, indeed, the person himself deserves it or not, but a respectful attitude towards any other person is the norm.

But how difficult it is to say this to children when they often observe disrespectful attitude from teachers to themselves. Doesn’t example teach? Demanding a respectful attitude and at the same time not respecting anyone yourself is just strange. I already wrote that many adults today, and often teachers, believe that children should not be respected. To children always – with condemnation and bias. Perhaps that is why today the school is in crisis in our society.

“I don’t want to go to school.” Why does a teenager not want to study?

09/28/2018

Teenagers do not want to study, and in general go to school. With this problem, many parents turn to the Children’s Helpline 8-800-2000-122. It happens that a child enjoyed his lessons, loved school, classmates and teachers, and then suddenly everything changed. And now he no longer approaches notebooks, he reluctantly gives in to the persuasion of his parents to take up his mind, every now and then he strives to get into the phone so that no one touches him.

Of course, tension is growing because adolescence is a crucial time when you need to do your best and get into a good university or find a job. Parents are puzzled about how to respond to the statement “this will not be useful to me in my life” and do not know at all how to inspire their children with the motivation to learn, set goals and live with pleasure at the same time.

What is behind this situation? An adult tries to return responsibility to the child, to force or convince him to study, and the teenager resists parental persuasion and tries to get out of the situation. It turns out a vicious circle in which no one gets what he wants.

The reason for the decrease in learning motivation is often not laziness at all. Here the features of age and the psychophysiological features inherent in it play a role.

Let’s divide the reasons for not wanting to study into three groups:

1. Social and psychological reasons: a teenager has problems with other people or features of age affect his learning motivation.
2. Lack of learning: the child does not have the skills to learn successfully, he does not know how to do it.
3. Educational errors: parents or teachers do something wrong.

What decisions and actions of parents can provoke a crisis of learning motivation ?

1. Sending the child to school early

If a child already knows how to read and write, this does not mean that he is ready for school. There is also psychophysiological development. At the age of 6, in preschoolers, especially boys, the hand is not ready for writing, the nervous system has not matured to the extent that it can maintain concentration for 45 minutes, so the child finds it difficult, he gets tired, and this makes him think that studying is unbearable and unpleasant process. This is fixed in the mind of the child and discourages the desire to learn in the future.

2. Building perspectives too far

“ If you don’t study, you’ll become a janitor ,” parents often scare. But to say this to a child of 13-14 years old is ineffective. Teenagers perceive such words of parents as an exaggeration. A teenager is most often motivated by immediate prospects and clear examples of success.

3. Lack of a clear organization of the child’s life

A regimen, a clear organization of the day, a clear range of household chores, for example, taking out the trash every other day, buying food twice a week, cleaning the apartment once a week, helps a teenager feel control over his life. If chaos and constant spontaneity reign in his daily life, then one can hardly expect him to be organized in his studies.

4. Lack of unity of demands on the part of parents

Often mom and dad, grandparents cannot agree on the rules by which a teenager should live. And he quickly understands that you can always find a loophole in the requirements if they are different from the parents. All adults in the family must agree and adhere to a single line so that the child knows the rules.

5. Incorrect methods of education

Suppression of personality leads to deplorable consequences. It is often voiced by the phrases: “ You are still nobody”, “You have not been asked ”, – and is also accompanied by threats, physical punishments or, conversely, excessive flattery: “Well, do it, please, I will allow you two more hours in phone play” . Parents are too tough or too soft. This is pressure or manipulation that causes psychological harm to a teenager, suppressing or corrupting him.

6. Excessive requirements without taking into account the objective capabilities of the child

Perhaps a teenager refuses to study not because he is lazy. This may be a feature of mental development, fatigue or physical ailment. Some parents believe that the stricter and more demanding they treat their child in school, the more responsible and diligent he will be. Alas, it is not. However, they do not praise the child at all. But the refusal of the child is perceived negatively. This leads to the fact that the child begins to perceive responsibility as a heavy burden, from which he gets tired and tries to get rid of. He is not confident in himself, he believes that he still cannot earn high marks from his parents, so he does not even try.

7. The habit of always being on the side of the teacher

Parents strive to support the teacher’s authority in the eyes of their child, but sometimes they take the teacher’s side thoughtlessly. A teenager should feel that parents are the people who will support and protect him in case of injustice. Then he will feel more confident at school, he will not be afraid to answer the accusations once again. This will make the teenager calmer.

8. Making fun of the child, frequent negative assessments

« Are you incapable even of such an elementary thing? You can’t do it, don’t even try! “. Unfortunately, parents say this to their children. These incorrect parenting practices relate to the parent’s emotional response and signify the discomfort and helplessness that the parent himself feels. When parents run out of educational resources, they get angry, offended, afraid, but they do not want to admit it and take out these negative emotions on the child. A teenager under such an attack closes, ceases to trust his parents or begins to actively defend himself, attack in response and refuse to fulfill the requirements presented in this form.

9. Demand for unconditional success in studies, punishment for poor grades

It is bad when parents are not interested in circumstances, but only in grades. But the assessment reflects the result of the learning process. A teenager could try, but simply did not understand something, miss something. It is no coincidence that teachers ask children to work on mistakes so that the child can figure out what and why he did wrong, for which he received this or that mark. Parents can help their child analyze what went wrong and why: “ How did you do it? Where did you start? Why did you do it this way here? »

What other reasons could there be?

1. Trouble, tense situation in the family

If there is a discord in the family between parents or other family members, and a teenager becomes a witness of frequent conflicts, negativity, then it is difficult for the child to make efforts to study. He is worried, tired emotionally and physically, and he does not have enough strength for school.

2. Class trouble

It is important for parents to find out if their child is having problems at school. Perhaps he did not have contact with the teacher or the methods of communication of teachers are not the most pleasant. Or the child may have problems with peers: offended, bullied, not accepted. Maybe it’s just such a period – he quarreled with friends, at the beginning of the school year he found out that his best friend had gone to another school, but he hadn’t found a new one yet, fell in love with a girl.

3. No target

Indeed, sometimes it is difficult for a teenager to understand why certain knowledge or skills will be useful to him in life. It is important to help the child to see this with illustrative examples. And most importantly, let him understand that studying helps a person develop. Rapid learning skills help in adult life – a person quickly masters new areas of work, quickly adapts to a new situation.

What skills does a child need to be able to learn:

1. Effort

He should have practical experience of living in a situation where you have to try, make an effort to get something. For example, from early childhood, a child should strive for something himself: to reach for a toy, later – to cut something out of paper himself, at a younger school age – to complete the work he has begun to the end, to get the desired thing only as a result of his labor. That is, it is necessary to form the habit of regulating one’s behavior.

2. Ability to follow instructions from an adult

Again, from early childhood, the child repeats everything after his parents and learns in this way. At senior preschool and primary school age, a child must learn not only to repeat after an adult, but also to reproduce actions according to instructions independently.

3. Ability to organize yourself

To do this, a child should have their own shelves in the closet, their own bedside tables, drawers, and boxes from childhood. He must know where everything is in the house and why. He must understand the daily routine and be aware of what he is following. He must live according to the regime and see that adults also follow the routine. At school age, as early as possible, he should know how much time it takes to complete a particular task in order to be able to calculate his time later.

4. Ability to break down an array of learning tasks into small steps

When a child sees a “colossus” of what needs to be done, he says: “ No, that’s impossible! ” and refuses to execute. Big and difficult work does not seem so scary if you divide it into parts and do it sequentially. If you do not do big things, then they will not disappear by themselves, but will accumulate and become even larger: from a small snowball they will turn into a big snowball.

The root cause is more important than dealing with the consequences. The first step towards increasing a child’s learning motivation is to eliminate the true causes of his crisis. It is important to reduce the negative impact of events and circumstances that led to a decrease in interest in learning. Remember that only the child who wants to learn is supported, praised for success, accepted as a person and trusted. Explain to your child that school is just a stage, and help them pass it with pleasure, together and despite any difficulties.

It’s hard for you and the teenager to understand everything, so if at some point it becomes difficult and you want to discuss it with professional psychologists, even just talk it out, feel free to call 8 800 2000 122!

The call is free and anonymous!

Your reliable family helper is your Child Helpline

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Why do children hate school and what to do about it? – Child development

Does your child not like going to school? Do you have to make him wake up every day, get ready and go to class? Are you afraid that this may become a habit and he will lose interest in learning? If you are concerned about your child’s growing hatred of school and want to help them right away, you should read this article!

The following describes possible reasons why children hate school and offers suggestions to help parents deal with it.

1. A sharp increase in the academic load. Sometimes you can notice that a child has suddenly changed his attitude towards school, this is especially striking at the beginning of a new school year.

• The child may have difficulty adapting to a change in the pace of learning compared to the previous grade (year).
• The curriculum may seem too heavy, or the child may find that they are getting too much homework or assignments each day.
• Also, if there are new subjects in the child’s schedule this year, he will probably find it difficult to cope with the extra workload, at least at first.

How to deal with this? As a parent, you must help your child move smoothly and comfortably from one grade to the next.

• Discuss academic workload with your child. If he feels that there is too much homework, make a schedule that will help him structure his time more effectively.
• Ask him to temporarily cut back on extracurricular activities and hobbies and focus on new subjects. Encourage your child to spend more time learning those subjects that are more difficult for him than others and where he feels lagging behind. After he gains confidence and good knowledge in school subjects, he can continue to pursue his favorite hobbies.

2. Bullying at school. School bullying is one of the worst nightmares a child can experience at school, despite strict rules against any form of humiliation and violence.

• Your child may be bullied at school by classmates, older students, or even some teachers.
• A group of children may tease or make fun of your child. Some children may threaten and bully him during school hours.
• Your child may be bullied by older students or others on the school bus or public transport.
• If your child walks home, they may be physically or verbally bullied by fellow travelers or neighbors.

How to deal with this? Watch for indirect signs, for some kind of signals that will tell you that your child has become a victim of bullying.

• The child may suddenly lose interest in school, to the point of hatred, or may suddenly become quiet and indifferent and lose interest in activities previously enjoyed.
• Talk softly to your child and find out if anyone has hurt them at school. Often, he may be afraid that if you complain to the school management or teachers, the bully will find out about it, and the bullying will continue, and maybe with renewed vigor. Calmly tell the child that you will help him in every way possible and will approach the solution of the problem with the mind.
• If your child is experiencing physical abuse, you should consult with the school administration, who will offer options for further action, including contacting the police, to prevent further violent behavior in the school.

3. Stress factor. Sometimes going to school can lead to such a stressful state that the child may refuse further education altogether.

• Your child can also suffer from a lot of stress in life, and many of them come from school.
• At school, a child is always under psychological pressure, as everyone expects him to study well and get good grades. At home, you also expect good preparation from your child, timely and high-quality completion of assignments, and night vigils before exams.
• With so many tasks, a child may simply not have enough time to communicate with peers. He may often miss meetings with friends, which are very important for his maturation and development, including his mental and social well-being.

How to deal with this? A parent is the person who can help a child find a balance between learning and socialization.

• Realize the importance of having friends and having fun in your child’s life. In an effort to succeed, don’t force him to become a bookworm and recluse.
• Help your child plan their day well. If he has a lot of homework during the week, make sure that he has enough time for rest during these five days, and on weekends he can let off steam with friends.

4. Lack of interest in studies. It is possible that instead of an active academic interest, your child feels some kind of professional inclination, a calling to something.

• The child may not be able to understand a particular subject or may be bored in class.
• He may consider it unnecessary to study something that does not interest him at all, and perhaps even recognize such study as a waste of time.
• Also, if your child has already studied a certain subject in the previous grade and has not made much progress in it, he may worry about the results of further study of this subject and lose all interest in it.

How to deal with this? Explain to your child how a particular school subject can expand their knowledge and help them achieve their own ambitions.

• At home, try to explain certain concepts to your child using teaching methods that are different from those used in school.
• If all else fails, ask the teachers, perhaps there is a pedagogical way to solve this problem, for example, tutoring.

Going to school is something your child should enjoy, something he should look forward to every day and not see as a punishment. Talk to teachers and the school psychologist about how you can help your child develop an interest in learning.

What to do if your child does not like school – Child Development daughter is functioning properly. After all, a healthy brain protects its owner from perceived threats.

The modern school is filled with stress and often frightens with its high test standards. In addition, there is such a huge amount of information that is considered necessary knowledge for passing exams that for many children, school is more like a force-feeding pen with facts without enough time or resources to make them interesting and relevant.

Overloaded schedule

If the school lacks interesting group and creative activities, lessons where one could join the arts or express oneself and one’s individuality, and sometimes there are not even full-fledged breaks, then why should a child want to go to it ? Many joyful school activities are sacrificed for the subjects that are assessed on tests (math and language). In addition, schools are required to adhere to a rigid curriculum. Therefore, even the best educators have fewer opportunities to use their skills to deliver the joyful, unforgettable learning experiences that children need. And as a punishment for everyone, many children drop out of school.

When asked about the reasons why children drop out of school, the vast majority of them complained of boredom. When asked what they mean by the word “boredom”, the children gave two main answers: “The teaching material is not interesting” and “The taught material is completely useless for me.”

From the point of view of neurologists and experienced teachers, empty, indifferent faces, pretense and abstraction of children from the educational process are not their fault and not their choice. The brain has evolved as an organ to promote human survival. His first priority is to avoid danger. Our attention is directly related to the ability to alert the brain to signals of potential danger. When the brain is stressed, attention automatically looks for a potential threat that could be causing emotional distress, while ignoring other sensory information, such as lesson material.

Stress is aggravated by boredom and frustration in humans and animals. Animals that are restrained or understimulated react with aggressive, destructive behavior and may even injure themselves. Stress causes their brain to pay attention only to an imagined or real threat. In this state, behavior no longer obeys the higher structures of the brain.

Similar reactions occur in the human brain. If children are stressed out by boring lessons that have little personal value, or frustrated by their inability to absorb an overloaded curriculum, their brains do what they are programmed to do. Information processing moves from higher brain structures (from the prefrontal cortex) to more primitive ones. In this situation, in humans, as in animals, involuntary behavioral responses are strictly limited to three types: fight, run, or freeze.

Watching teachers sadly cramming facts into children’s heads because they have the impossible task of getting the young mind to memorize test material, my heart aches for both the students and their teachers. Teachers need to tailor their learning to neuroscience research on stress, attention, behavior, and memory, because neuroscience can offer strategies to promote joyful learning.

Parents should protect their child’s brain

As parents, your task is to make sure that your children enjoy learning. You can change their attitude towards school and even change their brain reflexes. The strategy is to build “bridges” from information to information. How to build them?

You can create positive attitudes by connecting children’s schooling to their interests and helping them find the personal meaning of learning material to reduce stress levels and open neural pathways to the higher, intellectual area of ​​the brain where true learning occurs and creative thinking occurs.

At home with children, you can use strategies that can change negative attitudes about school and help develop the mindset your children need to restore and maintain positive attitudes about themselves and school. With this mindset and the change in negativity, their brains will be more receptive to focusing and remembering information during schoolwork and homework.

The success your children experience with their efforts will help develop new neural pathways that will respond to learning more effectively and store the information they receive into long-term memory. They will be able to successfully recall information not only to pass tests, but also to overcome all the difficulties and opportunities that await them in the 21st century.

So the key to this process is to build a “bridge” between the material taught in school, the children’s interests and past positive experiences, so that they themselves want to learn what they need to learn.

A look inside the brain

Neuroimaging studies show what metabolic and structural changes occur in the brain when new information is stored in the area responsible for memory. We know from these studies that memory store activity is increased when new information is linked to prior knowledge, self-interest, and positive emotional experiences.

Repeatedly linking family memories with new learning material is a kind of “brain glue”. New information establishes more connections (dendrites, synapses) each time the new and original memory are used together for a new purpose.

An example is the activation of memories of family trips and the establishment of a connection between these memories and new knowledge about the first settlers who traveled across the country in covered wagons. When you help your children connect new knowledge about the settlers with that long-term memory of family camping trips, school activities help produce more dendrites that carry that information to the neurons that store the memories. When your children want to recall their knowledge of history to take a test, remembering family trips will help them retrieve the relevant information they need to answer the test questions.

The brain keeps track of any effort – useful and useless

When children believe that the effort will pay off, it helps them find motivation for its application. The brain has evolved to survive. Survival happens when the brain evaluates the likelihood that the effort will be justified. The brain remembers the results each time it evaluates a situation (a difficult test question, confronting a classmate, choosing between study and play, choosing to listen carefully to a teacher’s explanation, qualifying for a sports team) and predicts whether a particular effort will pay off or not.

There is a special structure in the brain whose only job is to add pleasure, to cause a release of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex (the place where past memories are activated for prediction) when a prediction (choice, response, social reaction, application decision) physical effort, the decision that doing homework is a better choice than playing) turns out to be accurate.

This accumulated information about the predictions made and the results obtained is used by the brains of animals and humans to evaluate new similar situations that require effort. For example, imagine that a fox tried to chase a hare up a steep hill, with great effort and valuable energy in the pursuit, but in the end it failed. Now the fox will keep the memory of this. A memory cell will appear in her brain, which will contain information that the applied effort did not bring the expected result. A few more such failed attempts, and the fox’s brain will build a more and more accurate chain of memories for better survival. And now she will use it to decide whether to make an effort based on previous experience related to the steepness of the hill and the distance to the prey or not. Now the fox will not make an effort if memory tells him that chasing a hare up a steep slope is unlikely to be successful.

When a child’s brain develops a negative attitude towards school, it is usually the result of certain conclusions drawn from previous efforts. Based on a past history of failed attempts—for example, staying focused in class, paying attention to homework, persevering through difficult classwork that didn’t work—the child’s brain learns to automatically resist mental effort in subsequent similar sessions.

Sufficiently intelligent children may have difficulty with rote memorization. However, since such memorization is required in school and is therefore perceived as a valuable skill by students, they become convinced that their inability to focus in class or get high marks on memorized material means that they are not smart and cannot succeed. This kind of thinking is not only inaccurate, but if your child accepts it, it means that it will be harder for their body to form positive, result-oriented neural pathways.

Prepare your child’s memory for learning

Connect children’s brains to topics studied in school by looking at photos or videos of family trips, items belonging to children from countries they are studying, or reading favorite stories related to topics in the field science, history and mathematics. Curiosity, activated by reminders of past experiences and current interests, is the bridge between the information children need to receive in school and their brains. In addition, children develop an interest and a positive attitude, and they want to learn what they need to learn!

Ask children questions that help them personally connect stories, past experiences, possessions, or interests with current or upcoming learning topics. This will pique their interest and activate important memory structures. Stimulate your children’s curiosity so they want to find answers and solve problems. The brain maintains focus when children are personally interested in the answer to a question.

Stimulate children’s curiosity about school topics, and then work with them to find answers to questions that interest them. In doing so, you will help develop critical thinking skills and other frontal-brain executive functions that are activated when children analyze information (from their memories, books, the Internet, and from you) to answer questions. As children learn to focus and evaluate what information is relevant to answering questions and what is not, they develop higher thinking skills such as analysis, organization, and prioritization.

By linking school topics and children’s interests, sparking their curiosity, their brains will get a jump start in developing information processing skills that will help them succeed in academic, social and emotional challenges and opportunities throughout their lives. When children are motivated by curiosity and interest to ask questions and then look for answers to them, they develop the skills of prediction, deduction, independent thinking, analysis and the ability to distinguish facts from opinions, draw conclusions and defend their own opinion or ethical beliefs. These are rather side benefits from awakening the child’s curiosity about school topics and from reducing negative attitudes towards school.

Prepare to be your child’s brain coach

You may need to ask your child’s teacher about the curriculum ahead of time, although he or she will most likely follow the order of the textbook. And since you know what material will be covered in the next topic, you can find ways to start actively discussing it at home, in the car, or in line at the grocery store.

You may need a handy notepad with a list of open-ended questions, which can be a great way to connect your child’s interests with school topics. These may be hints on how to relate your experiences together to the material being studied. For example, if your child is into sports, your list might include the following question: “If you were the coach of a _______ team, how would you use _______ to help your team win?” In the first space, the child must enter their favorite sport or the name of their favorite team. The second space is for a related topic of schooling (gravity, arithmetic mean, multiplication, vocabulary, inventions or character traits inherent in characters in works of school literature).

Likewise, the discussions you will have to keep children interested in school material will serve as a strong cement for memories, as long as you actively and carefully listen when children express their thoughts or ask questions. You must give such conversations undivided attention. In order to keep kids motivated, they need to know that you really care about their thoughts and opinions.

Negativity turns into motivation

You can help children develop vital skills such as good memory, attention, organization and goal setting. By using your knowledge of your children’s interests, past experiences, and learning strengths to develop their interest in school subjects, you will help them improve their attitudes, motivation, perseverance, and ultimately their confidence. that their efforts will surely pay off.

Your involvement will help children gain a sense of how learning fits into the challenges of today’s life. You can help them develop neural structures in their brains that will help your children learn throughout their lives and apply their knowledge to real life situations.

The results will more than pay off your planning and preparation. If you use the knowledge that modern neuroscience provides to bring back the joy of learning to children, children’s smiles are sure to replace whining and discontent.

Judy Willis Psychology Today

Preparing Children for School – How do you prepare your child for school?

Preparing a child for school is an important stage that will help a first-grader quickly adapt to new conditions. Parents often think that it is enough for a preschooler to be able to count and read, but this is not entirely true. We tell you how to prepare your child for school at home.

Physical preparation for school

It is necessary to prepare not only the intellect, but also the body for study. Feeling good is the key to sustainable cognitive development.

Physical preparation of children for school includes the strengthening of immunity, the formation of healthy lifestyle habits, and the study of the basics of physical culture. Self-care needs to be taught from an early age.

The body of a preschooler changes very much: the structure of the lungs is formed, the reaction improves, fine motor skills of the hands develop. Movements become more thoughtful, harmonious, the vestibular apparatus works properly.

At the age of 6-7, the child grows rapidly, loves active team games. Outdoor games for preschoolers improve memory, increase intelligence, give a little relaxation. Choose a school that emphasizes exercise, gymnastics, and balance between study and play.

What can you do now?

1. Monitor your child’s nutrition . It should be balanced and rich. If necessary, take the time to visit a doctor to adjust the diet. Food directly affects brain function and alertness.
2. Good sleep . A preschooler should sleep no less than the norm. People around the world – both adults and children – sleep very little. This is the real problem of our age. Provide your baby with a comfortable bed, an established daily routine.
3. Decide which sport the preschooler wants to play . Football, basketball, running – the list is huge. Don’t forget to consider your child’s fitness level and temperament: for example, don’t force a timid 6-year-old girl who loves solitude into team dancing.
4. Walks in the fresh air have a beneficial effect on mental activity. Ventilate the apartment so that the child’s room is fresh.
5. Encourage children to be active : “This weekend we stay at home and play board games, but next week we will go skiing.” Sport should be associated with pleasure, pleasant pastime with the family.
6. Personal example works best. Find time for physical education, switch to proper nutrition, then the child will easily learn the new order.

Coordination, speed, endurance exercises will help. Try to introduce an element of a sports game into any activity: when going to the country, take a ball or badminton rackets with you, go into the forest, run a race.

Try not only to increase the load, but to make it more thoughtful. It is important to develop strength, flexibility, the ability to work in a team. Ideally, if the child attends classes with close friends or finds friends when visiting the sports section.

Daily exercise at home is the first step towards a developed body. How to perform exercises without harm to the child?

Adequate workout time is 25-30 minutes. Avoid excessive loads, it is dangerous.
Include a variety of exercises in your training program: combine body positions, add interaction with objects (rope, horizontal bar, hula hoop).

Practice in the morning if the child feels comfortable, but the afternoon workout is also beneficial.

The purpose of physical education lessons at school is to teach children to take care of the body. Broadcast these values ​​every day.

Talk to a preschooler about the importance of sport in a person’s life. A clear explanation will give the kid motivation, actions will become meaningful – better than lazy inefficient exercises.

Keep a diary of body changes. Avoid multilevel tables. Show your child how to calculate height, weight, their ratio, body temperature, blood pressure and other parameters that you consider necessary.

Encourage your child to play sports. Offer to choose a circle together, go to a trial lesson, chat with a coach.

Psychological preparation of a child for school

Psychological readiness is a vague concept with imprecise criteria. How do you know if your child is ready to go to school and successfully overcome obstacles? Usually children reach the desired level of psychological stability by the age of 7, so educators often recommend going to first grade at this age.

By the age of 7, a preschooler develops adequate self-esteem, childish spontaneity and excessive carelessness disappear. The kid gets used to a new social role.

The first few years of training are key. During this short period, a person’s attitude to the process of knowing the world is formed. It depends on parents and teachers what the child’s impressions will be – positive, neutral or negative. “Go read immediately so that 10 pages can be read today! You will retell! – such phrases do not inspire.

Let the search for information be a fun quest that will captivate the child for life. Pay attention to the teachers teaching at the school that the child will attend. Talk to them, find out how long they took refresher courses, what feedback they received during their work (including from students).

Eliminate aggression, causticity, shouting between household members. Home is a place of security and acceptance. In a calm environment, there is an opportunity to relax, gain strength before the next academic week.

In order to psychologically prepare a child for school, pay attention to the development of the following qualities:

1. Politeness. The standard rules of etiquette did not harm anyone, but in addition the child will have to learn the idea: people around should be treated with respect, with understanding, not to be rude to others.
2. Self-esteem. The ability to defend interests, to show oneself.
3. Experience of long-term cooperation with peers. Early childhood is characterized by constant communication with adults, but the development of independence in a child occurs only alone with people of the same age.
4. Psychological stability . If minor criticism causes tears, it is very difficult to go through life.
5. Area of ​​interest. The world should not be limited to a school desk, friends are not only classmates. Let the child see: there are many opportunities in the world, options for development. Didn’t work here – will do later.

Intellectual preparation for school

The intellectual readiness of a preschooler is a significant factor that directly affects the mood of a child. Educational workers argue that by the age of 7, children should be able to fantasize, have the beginnings of abstract thinking, and have a broad outlook (in accordance with age).

Someone will object: teachers should teach these skills, not parents. Yes, but the father and mother are primarily responsible. The education system directs, suggests the right decisions, but the result largely depends on the family.

What specific skills are we talking about?

1. Understanding the basics of the educational process: how the lesson goes, why change is needed, the rules of communication with the teacher and classmates.
2. Work with tasks that require advanced spatial thinking (decompose the object into separate components, mentally turn or move).
3. The ability to retell the content of texts (educational and fiction), reproduce the plot, analyze the meaning.
4. Developed short-term and long-term memory. The elementary school program is quite rich, the lessons are unusually long. You have to memorize quickly and a lot. To make it easier for a future first grader to learn the material at school, start doing simple exercises and games to develop memory in preschoolers.
5. Written and oral counting, reading, writing – the basics of literacy.
6. Listening comprehension, no problems with pronunciation. Expressive reading, pronunciation of remarks on roles.
7. Willingness to make experiments (including mental ones). This skill will come in handy outside of school as well.

Do not rush to fill your child’s head with knowledge from different areas. Parental perfectionism can grow to unprecedented proportions: today we learn Pushkin’s poems by heart, tomorrow we draw geometric shapes, next week we will sign up for music lessons …

This approach can be harmful. Arriving at primary school, the child will find that he already knows some of the material, clearly stands out in a better way compared to his classmates … And he will relax. When the time comes to gnaw at the granite of science, the kid will not be able to work, getting used to the fact that learning is easy.

The second possible outcome is fatigue. It is difficult for a 6-year-old child to hold attention and remember information. An excess of knowledge will discourage interest in development.

Conclusion: don’t overwork yourself. A rested child will achieve success faster than one exhausted by daily activities.

It is more important at this age to teach a child to work with information, highlight the main thing and reason logically – these skills will come in handy both during lessons and homework, and in everyday life. For the development of thinking, logical and mathematical tasks for preschoolers will be useful. The main thing is to do a little bit, without tiring the child, and offer the baby tasks in a playful way.

Children’s riddles about school are suitable for introducing a child to basic school subjects, the daily routine and duties of a primary school student. They will help the preschooler to more easily adapt to the new role of the student, arouse interest in learning and school life.

Recommendations for parents

To feel confident, a preschooler should develop willpower, the ability to work in a team, and communicate with others. Often talented students do not realize their potential because they are embarrassed to express their opinions, suffer from a lack of approval from classmates, and are afraid to make a mistake. Patterns of behavior are difficult to eradicate – once they appear, they haunt us for a very long time. The task of parents is to work out the fears of a preschooler in advance, to become a reliable support.

What does it take to successfully prepare a child for school at home? Here are some important tips for parents.

1. Teach the children to focus on the task at hand: try cooking dinner together, commenting on each step. Let the kid describe the algorithm in detail, explaining the actions and training to be involved in the process.
2. Business time, fun hour. To achieve the goal, you need to be able to refuse short-term pleasures. First we complete the tasks, only then we go for a walk. This will teach the child to separate the most important things from the less important ones.
3. Write or print homework instructions. Lists structure thoughts well, help to trace the logic of events.
4. Convey the thought to the future first-grader: asking for help is not a shame. If relatives and friends agree to support you in difficult times, then you are a good person. The motto “I can do it alone” does not emphasize invulnerability, but reduces the chances of coping with difficulties.
5. Developed socialization skills make life easier in kindergarten, school, section – in any group. Tell the child how people around contact with each other, provide mutual assistance, and achieve their goals.
6. Independence, resourcefulness, ingenuity. The teacher does not have the opportunity to focus on the needs of the child: classes include dozens of people. The child should be able to take care of himself.
7. Parents, bringing their child to the first grade, make a number of the same type of mistakes. One of them is the unwillingness to contact the teacher. “Go to the teacher, ask why she put a low mark”, “I’m not going to solve your problems, figure it out yourself.” A 7-year-old schoolboy cannot cope with a load that even a teenager cannot handle.
8. Attend parent-teacher meetings, join discussions on an equal basis with other parents, otherwise you will miss the moment. Be interested in the emotional state of the child, ask about new friends or ill-wishers. There was a conflict, the intervention of an adult is required? Do not withdraw yourself, make sure that the situation is resolved in favor of the child.
9. A common cliché is bullying. “Now we allow you everything, we indulge, but at school you will sing differently! There is a strict aunt, you can’t play, you are punished for bad behavior.” Guess what feelings the process of education will cause as a whole.
10. Suppression does not promote maturation, full development. Fear paralyzes, and in time causes hatred. Having matured, the child will flatly refuse to attend a place where he is forced to endure inconvenience – school. That is why it is important to stay positive.

The main thing is family support. With her, the child will grow up and learn new things without stress and worries.

Thinking Trainer

Thinking Trainer is a database of 4,000 tasks designed specifically to develop the thinking skills of students in grades 1-4

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Psychologist’s advice on the topic “the child does not want to go to school”. My child does not want to go to school

It is quite common today in the field of education when a child does not want to go to school. Parents of both elementary school students and teenagers can face this phenomenon. What should adults do in this case? First of all, you should discard the thoughts that you have a bad son or daughter, or that you are to blame for the situation. And then you need to figure out the reason why your child says: “I don’t want to go to school.” What can I do to make him enjoy studying? to resolve this issue are given in this article.

Finding out the reason for not wanting to study

When parents feel that their child is getting sadder as autumn approaches, they should definitely find out the reason for this condition.

If we are talking about a junior school student, you should pay special attention to his drawings. After all, often kids display their fears on paper. Perhaps the main theme of the drawing will be an angry teacher or children who are fighting. Also, a game can be a good option to identify the reasons for not wanting to go to school. For example, a beloved bear cries when the first of September comes. Or the bunny refuses to go to school. Let the kid explain the reason for this behavior of toys.

In the case when the words “I don’t want to go to school” come from the lips of a high school student, the root of the problem can only be revealed through a confidential conversation with your child.

The period of adaptation to school

During September-October, the adaptation of a son or daughter to school takes place. For some children, the adjustment period may even last until the New Year. At this time, parents who hear: “I don’t want to go to school” are advised to:

• pay more attention to the child than usual;
• observe what your son or daughter draws, what games he/she prefers and what worries him/her;
• support the baby in every possible way;
• try to communicate more often with his teachers and classmates.

You should also be responsible for observing the daily routine. And this applies to both elementary and high school students. A prerequisite is a fixed time to go to bed. You should also set an alarm clock so that the morning awakening does not occur at the last moment, when it is already time to leave the house, but there is an opportunity to calmly wake up, stretch, do exercises, have breakfast and go to school. Nervousness and being late – a categorical “no”!

If a child does not want to go to school, there may be various reasons for this. It is necessary to dwell on each of them in detail. First, consider the problems that may arise in children of primary school age.

The first reason. Fear of a first-grader before the new and unknown

Why at school? The first reason for this is the fear of something new and unknown, which is most often experienced by home, “non-garden” kids. They are afraid of a lot of factors. For example, that mom will not be able to constantly be around, that she will need to communicate with people who were not previously familiar, that classmates will turn out to be unfriendly. Sometimes children who are not accustomed to independence are even afraid to go to the toilet, as it seems to them that they can get lost in the corridors.

If a child says “I don’t want to go to school” just because of the fear of something new, what should parents do in such a situation? In the last days of August, the child should be given a tour of the school so that he gets acquainted with the classrooms, corridors and toilets. And then on the first of September, all these places will be familiar to the baby, and he will not be so scared. If you are lucky enough to meet other, older students, it is recommended to communicate with them in front of the child, and maybe even introduce them to your baby. Let the older guys tell the future first-grader how they like to study, what good teachers work at school, how many new friends you can make here.

Parents can also tell their life stories about how they were afraid to go to the first grade, what exactly scared them then. These stories must have a happy ending. Then the baby realizes that there is nothing to worry about, and everything will definitely be fine.

The second reason. The presence of a negative experience in a student of elementary grades

Sometimes it happens that a child who says: “I don’t want to go to school” has already had the opportunity to experience the learning process earlier. Maybe he’s already finished first grade. Or the kid attended preschool classes. And as a result, the experience was negative. There can be many reasons for this. For example, the child was teased by other children. Or it was difficult for him to absorb new information. Or maybe there were conflict situations with the teacher. After such unpleasant moments, the child is afraid of their repetition and, accordingly, says: “I don’t want to go to school.”

What should parents do in this case? The main advice, as in all other cases, is to talk to the child. If the conflict with the teacher was to blame for everything, there is no need to say that the teacher is bad. Indeed, for a first grader, he is almost the first unfamiliar representative of the adult world. Communicating with him, the child learns to build relationships with elders. Parents should try to look at the situation with an open mind and understand who is right and who is wrong. If the kid did something wrong, you need to point out to him the mistake he made. If the teacher is to blame, then the child should not be told about it. Just write it down, for example, in a parallel class to minimize their communication with this teacher.

If there was a conflict with classmates, you should analyze this situation, give the right advice and teach the child to solve problems of this nature on his own. The kid should be conveyed that you will always support him, that you are on his side and that he can always count on you, but he must deal with his peers himself. The main task of parents is to explain how to get out of such situations so that all parties to the conflict are satisfied.

The third reason. Fear of a first-grader that he will not be able to do something

From early childhood, parents unknowingly cultivated this fear in their child. When he said that he wanted to do something on his own, the adults did not give him such an opportunity and argued that the baby would not succeed. Therefore, now, when a child does not want to go to school, he may be afraid that he will not succeed in studying well or that his classmates will not want to be friends with him.

What should parents do in this situation? You should remember the moments when the child achieved success as often as possible, praise him and be sure to cheer him up. The kid should know that mom and dad are proud of him and believe in his victories. It is necessary to rejoice with the first-grader in his small achievements. You should also entrust him with various important tasks so that the child understands that he is trusted.

The fourth reason. It seems to a primary school student that the teacher does not like him

A primary school student may have a problem when it seems to him that the teacher does not like him. Often this is due only to the fact that there are a lot of children in the class and the teacher simply does not have the opportunity to personally address each child and praise him. Sometimes it is enough for a child to make just one remark so that it seems to him that the teacher is biased towards him. The result of this is that the child does not want to go to school.

What should adults do if this situation arises? First of all, you need to explain to your son or daughter that a teacher is not a mom or a dad, not a comrade or a friend. The teacher should give knowledge. You need to listen carefully and ask questions when something is not clear. Parents should communicate with the teacher, consult with him and be interested in the success of the child. In the case when the teacher really disliked your child and you cannot influence it, you should advise the kid to nitpick. If the conflict is really serious, you need to consider the option of transferring the child to a parallel class.

Now it’s time to look at the reasons why teenagers don’t want to learn.

The fifth reason. A high school student does not understand why he should study

Sometimes it happens that a high school student says: “I don’t want to go to school” because he does not understand why he needs the acquired knowledge and where he can subsequently apply it.

What should parents do in such a situation? You need to try to tie the subjects studied at school to real life. You should learn to find physics, chemistry, geography and biology in the world around you. To form an interest in acquiring knowledge, it is recommended to visit museums, exhibitions and educational excursions with the child. When walking in the park, you can try to draw his plan together. Ask your high school student to help you translate the text from English and then be sure to thank him. The main task of parents is to form a stable interest of the child in learning at school.

The sixth reason. Poor performance of a high school student

Often the reason for unwillingness to study is the banal poor performance of a student. He simply cannot understand what the teacher is talking about. Boredom becomes the main emotion in the lesson. The longer this misunderstanding goes on, the more likely it is that a dead end situation will develop, when the essence of the subject completely eludes the child. And if the teacher scolded or ridiculed the student in front of the whole class for poor progress, then the desire to teach this subject can leave the high school student forever. It is not surprising that in such a situation the child does not want to go to school.

How to help a teenager in this case? The easiest way to make up for his missing knowledge on a particular subject is when the discovered problem is relatively recent. If one of the parents is sufficiently knowledgeable in the desired industry and if he has the necessary patience, you can work with the child at home. A good option is to visit a tutor. But first of all, you should try to explain to the high school student how important knowledge of a particular subject is. Without awareness of this fact, all subsequent classes can be wasted.

The seventh reason. A senior student is not interested

Another reason why a child does not want to study at school may be his giftedness. Sometimes a high school student who grasps information on the fly is simply not interested in attending classes. After all, the educational process is designed for average students. And if the child has to listen to the information that is familiar to him, his attention is dulled and a feeling of boredom appears.

What parents should do If the school has a class for such students, it is recommended to transfer your son or daughter there. If not, then you need to help the child satisfy his curiosity through self-study.

In the case when the lack of interest in learning is due not to special talent, but to a banal lack of motivation, one should try to interest the child. It is necessary to identify several main areas that attract him, and help him develop in this direction. For example, if your son or daughter is interested in a computer, have him/her help you with simple tasks for your job. For this, the child should be thanked, and maybe even allocate symbolic wages. This will be the motivation, which in this case is necessary.

The eighth reason. Unrequited love of a high school student

In adolescents, the problem of unrequited love can become very acute due to their age, temperament and hormonal levels. The child utters the words “I don’t want to go to school” because of the unwillingness to see the object of their feelings.

In such a situation, parents are strictly forbidden to shower ridicule on their son or daughter, because the case is really serious. Their task is to be there, support and encourage their child and have heart-to-heart conversations when the teenager is ready for this. If he asks to be transferred to another school, parents should not agree and be led by the emotions of a high school student. It should be explained that emerging problems need to be solved, and not run away from them. Convince the child that over time everything will get better and new happiness is sure to await him ahead.

The ninth reason. A teenager’s conflict with classmates

The reasons for conflicts between a child and classmates can be varied. It is difficult to do without disputable situations and clashes of interests. But if relations with other teenagers are constantly tense, the student begins to feel like an outcast and, of course, the mother hears: “I don’t want to go to school. ” The child is constantly in a state of stress, the school becomes that place, even the thought of which causes discomfort in a high school student. The combination of these factors destroys his self-esteem and negatively affects the worldview of the child.

The main thing that parents should not do in such a case is to let the situation take its course. You should try to call your son or daughter to a confidential conversation. After that, you need to tell your vision of solving the problem that has arisen, give some advice. For example, for a student to stay close to a teacher or another adult during breaks. In case of ridicule and aggression from classmates, one should silently, avoiding visual contact and not responding to provocations, leave. The child should feel confident and not practice victim behavior. This will be indicated by his posture, his head held high, a confident look. A high school student shouldn’t be afraid to say “no”.

If the situation escalates, teachers and a school psychologist, if available at your child’s school, should be involved to solve the problem.

Why do children not want to go to school? The main task of every parent is to find the answer to this question in relation to their child. If the cause was identified, then it is not so difficult to solve the problem. If you could not cope on your own, you should seek help from teachers or a school psychologist. In no case should parents solve the problem with the help of forceful methods or by putting pressure on their son or daughter. The child should feel that mom and dad are always on his side and are ready to support him at any time.

MOSCOW, November 20 – RIA Novosti.
About half of Russian students do not want to go to school because of dislike for the teacher, Alexander Kuznetsov, president of the Association of Child Psychologists and Psychiatrists of Russia, told RIA Novosti. What difficulties schoolchildren face, how to return the child’s motivation for learning and instill independence, experts told RIA Novosti on the eve of Children’s Day, which is celebrated on November 20.

Mom, is the weekend coming soon?

The mother of a second-grader, a student of a secondary school near Moscow, Maria Rempel did not expect that her eight-year-old son Mark might have problems with his studies. She herself studied at school with excellent marks, but Mark cannot yet boast of such success. The boy graduated from the first quarter of the second academic year with one C in Russian.

“He dislikes school so much that every day he asks me when the weekend will be,” Rempel told RIA Novosti.

According to the parent, her son has no desire to study because the school teacher could not interest him. “We used to come to school to study, but now we come to show what we have learned at home with our parents,” she said.

In addition, according to Rempel, there are many difficult and strange tasks in school textbooks, which even not every adult can solve. “And the parents of a second-grader have to solve problems with the collective mind in special forums on the Internet or by phone,” Rempel said. As a result, it turns out that it is not the children who are more concerned about doing homework, but the parents themselves.

Study, study, study

The unwillingness of a child of any age to go to school is self-defense against a heavy load, says Inna Golenok, a teacher of the Russian language and literature, an honored teacher of the Russian Federation.

“It turns out that the child is uncomfortable, uncomfortable from what he does not do, and when he starts doing everything, he is also uncomfortable, because he gets tired,” she explained.

Golenok noted that the workload of teachers associated with shortcomings in basic planning is projected onto students. “The program is designed in such a way that sometimes one hour a week is allocated for a subject. And according to all psychological rules, one hour a week should not be at all: knowledge is not fixed, there is no repetition, hence the big load,” the teacher believes.

Director of Physics and Mathematics Lyceum N 239 in St. Petersburg, winner of the All-Russian competition “Director of the school-2012” Maxim Pratusevich agrees that the program for modern schoolchildren is not easy. However, he considers laziness to be the main reason for not wanting to go to school.

“There is little time and one has to work, and work is not very accepted these days. Children are not accustomed to work. They say that studying should be fun in order to study well, but this is not so. Studying is hard work. We study for life, but in life you have to work hard, be able to do it,” Pratusevich said.

What do they teach at school?

Child psychologists are sure that the key role in the child’s attitude to school is played by the first teacher, who must motivate the child to study. President of the Association of Child Psychologists and Psychiatrists Alexander Kuznetsov told RIA Novosti that schools in Russia have always lacked an individual approach to each student.

“The school is focused on the average student, so there can be no talk of any individuality. It has been proven that strong students descend to the average level after two or three classes,” Kuznetsov said.

According to him, often a child does not want to go to school precisely because he does not love his teacher. Or a child goes to school not for knowledge, but just to talk and show off in front of their peers. “We don’t like a subject for which we don’t like a teacher. From our practice, about 50% of children in elementary school, when asked about a teacher, answer that they don’t like the teacher,” the psychologist noted.

According to Kuznetsov, if parents want their child to have no problems with learning at school, they must preserve the main thing – the child’s motivation to learn. “And not due to the fact that studying is work, this is a big stupidity, but on the contrary, to explain that studying is always interesting. We need to look for ways not to kill the child’s natural curiosity for knowledge,” he noted.

The right help

The psychologist gave some practical advice to parents who cannot force their child to go to school. First of all, parents should find out if the child likes the teacher. “If the child doesn’t like the teacher, change the teacher. It could be a teacher at a nearby school. You don’t have to become attached to a school just because it’s the closest to home,” recommends Kuznetsov.

If you can’t find a good teacher, your child can be homeschooled. “According to the new law on education, this can be done very simply: you come to school, write an application and that’s it. Then you just need to take control tests,” the psychologist explained, noting that his children, for example, have long been comprehending the school curriculum at home.

Studying at home saves a lot of time and develops independence in the child. “If a child can read, he can study the topic on his own. If he has a question, he can ask his parents or watch numerous video tutorials on the Internet,” Kuznetsov said.

Another tip is to assign prizes to your child so that he is fully motivated to do his homework on his own. For example, children can earn the right to twenty minutes of cognitive apps on a tablet after 8 p.m. Subsequently, the child will get used to a certain course of events, to the ritual and will begin to do homework on their own.

“Parents don’t understand how to help their child do their homework. They can’t force the child to leave the computer and do homework for them for five hours. As a result, the child gets used to it and says: “Mom, it’s late, but could you do physics for me?!” The child develops such an attitude that my mother still won’t let me go until I do my homework, and since she also needs to go to bed, she will eventually do everything for me, I just need to be more stupid and do less,” Kuznetsov explained.

The psychologist noted that about 20% of children have attention deficit disorder. “Therefore, one more piece of advice: children need to be taught to relax and break complex tasks into small ones. So that the child does not have the feeling that he is sitting at the lessons until he is blue in the face,” he said. To control the time of work and rest, you can use a timer for cooking or an hourglass.

In elementary grades, it is imperative to teach a child to read. “By instilling a love of reading, you will insure yourself against most problems in education,” the psychologist believes. The easiest way to teach your child to love books is to show interest in what your child reads to you. “We usually have very little time to hear a child. When you listen to a child, he really likes to read to an adult, especially if the adult is sincerely interested,” Kuznetsov added.

Sometimes it is important to buy textbooks for the previous grade and to diagnose and determine the level at which the child copes with “excellent”. “And tell the child: that’s it, we start studying at this level at home. We need to catch up with the program so that the person gets on solid ground and feels confident in the classroom,” the psychologist said.

But the most important rule that parents should remember is to never tell a child that he is stupid, and do not get annoyed if he does not understand something. “If you are annoyed, then you set inflated goals. Go lower. And be sure to encourage the child’s independence,” Kuznetsov concluded.

Question:
The child does not want to study, is afraid and does not want to go to school. What should parents do?

Together we will try to find answers to these questions.

From the very first days, the school poses a number of tasks for the child, requiring the mobilization of his intellectual and physical strength. This state can be called a state of internal tension, doubt, self-doubt.

Such psychological stress, being long enough, can lead to disappointing results: the child becomes inattentive, undisciplined, distracted, indifferent to the performance of educational tasks, quickly gets tired, lags behind in studies, and simply does not want to go to school. Can parents somehow help him avoid this, overcome the difficult path “preschooler – schoolboy” without any special upheavals and unnecessary psychological trauma?

Today it is widely believed that the problem of modern children is the lack of a fundamental vector, a goal in life, the desire to get everything at once. But is it? Maybe it’s not that they know little about what a “real person” should be, do not participate in public life, spend most of their free time at a computer or watching TV?

Over the past 20 years, our country has undergone such profound and serious changes that it could not but affect the school. More recently, reforms have come to the school. The family has become the main thing in the upbringing of children, the responsibility for the behavior and attitude of the child to the educational process has now completely fallen on the shoulders of the parents, and this is quite natural – the teacher’s task is to provide the necessary amount of information, and our parental task is to help our children to perceive new knowledge. The school has ceased to be the main link in the process of raising a child, and this must be taken for granted. We were left alone with the problems of our children. So let’s learn to understand them without relying on outside help. The upbringing of our children is our sole responsibility.

Why do children not want to study?

The first of September for a preschooler who crosses the threshold of school is not only a new satchel, a large beautiful bouquet of flowers and new friends, it is also a rather serious test that life offers him.

The physical and psychological stress that falls on a first-grader is almost harder than those experienced by graduates of the eleventh grade. Often, even well-prepared children who attended kindergarten and already have basic communication skills have difficulties.

The first year of schooling is an extremely difficult, critical period in a child’s life. His place in the system of social relations is changing, his whole way of life is changing, his psycho-emotional load is increasing. Mobile kindergarten games are being replaced by daily training sessions. And not very clear classes.

One first grader spoke proudly about how she goes to school to become a good student. She listens very carefully to the teacher, does not talk to her neighbor on the desk, learns letters, but only in kindergarten she liked it more, because it was more interesting there, and the teachers also loved her and allowed her to run.

It is very difficult for a first-grader to understand why he came to school, he needs not only to change from an obedient child into a good student, but also to realize that the main thing is not the ability to “not make noise”, “not to fight”, but to gain knowledge. There is a certain substitution of the concepts of “learning” and “behaving well”. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this – the student listens carefully, does not get distracted in the lessons, respectively, and knowledge will come. But it’s not. The child experiences emotional discomfort due to the uncertainty of ideas about the teacher’s requirements, he does not understand the very task of learning. He reads, solves examples, writes neatly, not at all because it is necessary for his own development, he will simply be praised for it. And if he does not want to be praised, if he wants to play with his favorite doll or roll cars? Then the protest begins. Usually it is expressed in unwillingness to go to school, in nitpicking about clothes, tears for no reason. Children cannot always explain their feelings, and therefore they throw senseless tantrums about the dress in which they will not go to school, the fact that they were woken up early, and the porridge for breakfast is tasteless.

One of the students to the teacher’s question: “Natasha, why are you so sad today? Did someone offend you? ”, Invariably answered:“ My mother forbids me to go to school in sneakers. One day, the teacher, having met with her mother, made a joint decision to let the girl come to class in sneakers (although, of course, a beautiful dark blue dress looks better with shoes). But, having received permission to wear sneakers, Natasha declared the next day that she always wanted to go to school only in boots.

And these are not whims at all. This is a protest expressed in a way accessible to the child. In such a situation, before forbidding a child to wear sneakers, I would advise parents to carefully ask him about what he does at school and how his classmates treat him. It is most convenient to do this in an allegedly random conversation, and in no case should you ask “head on”: “What did you do at school? Don’t the guys hate you?”

Even if they offend, few people admit it – this is not a kindergarten, “schoolchildren do not slander their parents.” It is easier for your child to remain silent than to expose himself as a sneak or a loser. Therefore, it is best to start such conversations from afar, accidentally remembering one of your classmates or an event in which the class took part. Never rush, be patient and you may find out more than you intended. Hurry up – the child will close and the next time he will be more careful to enter into a dialogue.

So, we have found out that from the first days the school puts before the child a number of tasks that require the mobilization of his intellectual and physical forces. How can we help him to realize the need for “work for its own sake”? Of course, you can talk to him about the future, talk about those who studied poorly and did not go to college. This is very useful information, especially for a first-grader, for whom “institute” and “space” are equally far away, and maybe space will even be closer. Any talk about a happy future at this age is meaningless! Children live in the present. Naturally, they dream, but I assure you, it is not at all about how they will become doctors or famous mathematicians, for them the future career is a means of acquiring a new toy or the opportunity to go to an amusement park. And how then to explain to a small person the importance of attending school, to convince him of the need for a complete and final parting with the “kindergarten” ideas about classes?

Please don’t forget that, despite the new status, your child is still small, you shouldn’t tell him about his future admission to the institute or about how he will become a “janitor”. Try to get by with simple examples and motives: “It’s so good to know a lot! How can we go on vacation to Egypt in the summer when you have not learned how to write the name of this country beautifully? etc. The new social situation of development demands from the child a special activity—learning.

When a child comes to school, there is no educational activity as such, no one is involved in solving complex mathematical problems, the lessons are more introductory than scientific, many of them are built in the form of didactic games. Therefore, we can talk about learning activities as a way to form the ability and desire to learn. This is a special specific task of primary school age. Unfortunately, the child cannot realize this specificity, the activities offered to him at school in no way correspond to his personal desire, he needs specifics that he can evaluate himself and tell his parents about it. In kindergarten, he was explained quite clearly: if you behave well – well done, cleaned the bed after a daytime sleep – well done! I didn’t run away for a walk – very well done! There is no such thing at school, especially in the first grade, when they don’t give grades, and you endlessly write out some kind of sticks in a notebook, or draw Christmas trees in mathematics, or listen to a book that the teacher reads. How can he, the poor man, know whether he is good or not! And then he goes to the teacher. And everything would be fine if he studied alone in the class, otherwise, besides him, there are 29 morepeople are waiting for their own work to be evaluated.

One second-grader to the question: “How are things at school?” replied: “I don’t know.” And he did not deceive, he sincerely did not know how he was doing: it seems that he is not scolded, it seems that they are not praised, and if they are praised, then for an activity that is absolutely incomprehensible to him. And any incomprehensible activity leads to a “brain lull”.

The peculiarity of studying at school is the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Only in the school, where the main part of the activity is the acquisition of scientific knowledge, special conditions have been created for exclusively intellectual activity.

In the family, in the yard during a walk, in the game, a small person acquires worldly concepts, but within the walls of the school, his task is to assimilate the first theoretical and practical scientific knowledge and skills. Throughout all the years of schooling, the child is taught to learn, but in elementary school, when this type of learning activity is formed and formed, this task is leading.

But how to explain to a child that “drawing carrots” is the way to future science? Many parents believe that there is no need to explain anything to children: “He should do his homework! He is obliged! ”, there is another wonderful argument:“ This is now your job, you must study! And if you get bad grades, I’ll never buy you anything again.” What if the child begins to study poorly, and not at all because he does not want, but cannot, is not able to perceive the material at a given pace, or has missed something somewhere, but cannot catch up on his own? This also happens often. It is very important not to miss the moment when the child ceases to understand the educational material, when the fulfillment of a task that is absolutely elementary, in your opinion, becomes a problem for him. It doesn’t have to be in the first days of training or even in the first year, but one day you will encounter it one way or another. How to behave with a child in a similar situation?

Childhood flies so quickly. All the skills that children acquire at this wonderful time will be useful to them in adulthood. And everything seems colorful and bright, but the colors of life are not always pleasing. The child does not want to go to school – this problem becomes torture for the child and parents. Why does this happen, who is to blame and, finally, what to do? Let’s try to write out a recipe that will turn a dreary obligation into an interesting and educational process.

What causes reluctance to attend school

“I don’t want to” can have completely different meanings. This is what adults should understand first of all.

1. The daily rhythm implies the cyclical performance of certain tasks. Sooner or later, even a favorite activity that must be done without fail tires us. Do you also not always want to go to work, or do something around the house? If the point is only this, the offspring periodically whines that he does not want to go to school – there is no problem. Psychologist’s advice: sometimes, if you see that the children are tired, give “legal” absenteeism. By doing this you will win 3 bonuses:
   • earn extra points as a loving and pampering parent;
   • prevent real overwork;
   • give the opportunity to miss the cool team.
2. The child has changed, withdrawn into himself, become aggressive. Going to school has turned into torture, the fees are accompanied by tears, and the teenager began to play truant every day – beat the bells. The presence of such facts speaks of a serious problem. The sooner you find and eliminate it, the less the child’s psyche will suffer.

Reasons for rejection

1. Conflicts with classmates. Children are often violent. They cannot see the situation in volume, as adults. Therefore, they evaluate it and the consequences of their actions in a completely different way. Classmates can bully because of some external flaws, complexes. But, often the cause of general rejection can be the character or behavior of the child himself. This happens when a son or daughter enters a new team. The desire to stand out, to show oneself from the “best” side, to defend oneself with an attack, all this can have a distorted form. Surrounding children will not understand the impudence of a beginner and will poison him. As a result, reluctance to go to school
2. Lack of interest in the learning process occurs in three cases:
   • the child is behind the school curriculum. Even very smart and developed children can get a knowledge gap in some subjects or sections. The reasons are different: illness, family circumstances, mismatch of abilities and orientation of training;
   • on the contrary, the program does not keep up with the student. The child is inquisitive, reads a lot, is interested in the news of science and technology. Parents do a lot for his development. It grows out of the school curriculum as out of an old form;
   • the intellectual abilities of the child do not allow him to adequately perceive the material. Your baby really wants and tries hard. But, due to his abilities, he still cannot master the curriculum at a sufficient level. From this, hands drop, interest is fading more and more.

Attention! Most parents want their children to be talented, obedient, and brilliant. Learn to love them for who they are, don’t ask for more. Often the reluctance to go to school is caused by a discrepancy between your requirements and the capabilities of the child.

1. Temperamental dissonance between the student and the teacher causes dislike for school, especially in the lower grades. An imperious, energetic, noisy teacher can suppress a calm, insecure kid. On the contrary, a too calm, amorphous teacher will not hold a nimble naughty in his hands. Behavior problems will lead to poor performance in subjects, and then a chain reaction.

It is important to know and understand your child’s personality and temperament. If the baby is restless and hyperactive from the first days of life, get ready for the fact that he will need to pay 3 times more attention than a calm baby. Such children are characterized by: unbridled curiosity, a thirst for action, non-recognition of authorities, a quick change of activity. The baby will poke his nose into all corners of the world around him without fear and apprehension. The task of parents is to teach the baby to concentrate on one thing for more and more time. This will be important when teaching at school. In order to achieve this, you must be a very patient person and have a rich imagination and ingenuity. Otherwise, all attempts at learning will lead to a complete rejection of the perception of any knowledge. This is where the first one comes out: “I don’t want to go to school.”

1. Personal problems. Children experience their first love in different ways. Lack of reciprocity can be stressful for someone. It happens that everything is complicated by the publicity of love failure.
2. Family problems are a difficult test for children. The divorce of parents, the death of one of them are factors from which children give up.
3. Inattention and lack of control by adults, one of the most common causes. If three decisive factors coincide: laziness, lack of control, the presence of bad friends, a very disturbing and unpromising picture emerges. This situation has been brewing for a long time. Her parents are to blame.

Ways out of the situation

If you have come to the conclusion that the reluctance to attend school is not a far-fetched, but a real problem with a deep bottom, take a number of simple actions.

1. Talk to the child. It is better to do it in a relaxed atmosphere. For example, spend the weekend together in the park, on the rides. Create a good mood for yourself and your son or daughter. At the moment of an emotional outburst of a person, it is easier to talk. If he stubbornly does not want to discuss this topic, do not push. In this case, try to get information from friends or teachers. If there are any changes in the behavior of a child or teenager, be sure to talk to the class teacher, listen to his advice. The teacher sees our children in situations that cannot be created at home. Often children trust their favorite teachers with the most intimate, what they are afraid to tell their parents about. If you receive information, try to present it to the children in a way that they do not understand where it leaked from. Otherwise, the teacher will turn from an ally into a traitor.
2. Many parents choose a school based on its prestige and profile. If we talk about elementary school, then it is necessary to choose not a school, but a teacher. It is important that the kid likes his teacher, and they match each other in temperament. Where there is sympathy and love, there will be no problems. Even if somewhere he lags behind because of his abilities, with the right tactics of a caring teacher, this will not become a tragedy. The desire to learn will not be lost. If we talk about the profile, then the most suitable age for the transfer is 8-9Class. In the case when a bet is made on 1-2 subjects, you can study them with the help of a tutor, studying at your favorite school.
3. The teaching staff is a separate issue. But, in a nutshell: children who are loved and perceived as individuals, given their characteristics and abilities, will always love their school. Accordingly, they will try to study, take part in circles, sections. The school community will be treated like a family. Is it different in your case? Read reviews of schools in your area and consider changing teams.
4. If the reason is a conflict with classmates, try to sort out the situation as quickly as possible. Get information from different sources. Do not rush to find the culprit. The child may be wrong, but out of fear of being punished, he will distort the situation. This happens often. Listen to all parties, witnesses, and only then make a decision and start doing something. Try to reconcile the parties to the conflict. But, if we are talking about bullying, or the situation has dragged on for a long time, the advice of a psychologist does not work – look for another school.
5. In case of lagging behind the program in one or two subjects, study with the child yourself or resort to the help of a tutor. When everything starts to work out, children feel their strength and significance, their self-esteem increases and life gets better. It is better to send gifted children to specialized schools, with an expanded and complicated program. This will give them more opportunities and increase their interest in learning. If the child is weak, all attempts at extra classes have failed, do not be discouraged. There are many careers in life that suit your toddler or teen. Orient him to the type of activity that he likes. What to do for this, the psychologist will tell you.
6. Take problems on the personal front seriously. Give examples from your school life. Distract the child, if necessary, cry with him. Explain that everything in life is changing, and soon he will laugh at what causes melancholy today. School love rarely ends in a long-term relationship, it must be experienced like chickenpox. The advice of a psychologist will also be useful here.
7. Handle your interpersonal problems in a way that does not involve children. They must have a father and a mother. Even if they no longer live together. Supervise children and keep in touch with each other. It often happens that a child says to his father that he is with his mother, and vice versa to his mother. In fact, left to itself.
8. Your child’s teachers are not specially trained Cerberus. They are not your enemies, but your friends. The best thing you can do is to keep in touch with the school. The child will understand that he is under control, and you will be aware of all school affairs. In this case, reluctance to attend school rarely occurs.

In order to prevent bad thoughts from entering children’s heads, it is necessary to reduce the amount of free time. To do this, there are a large number of sections, circles, music, sports and dance studios and schools. Forget the most common excuses:

• no time to drive;
• he is already very tired;
• we went, but we didn’t like it.

This is a lie to justify one’s own laziness. Those who want will find opportunities, those who do not want will find excuses.

The tighter and more interesting the child’s working day is, the more he will be able to do. Where there is employment, there is success and prosperity. And, therefore, an additional motivation for attending school, because this is a place where you can show off your talents.

Reluctance to go to school is a protest or defensive reaction against some circumstances that are uncomfortable for the child. Eliminate them and the problem will be solved. Being a parent is the most responsible and difficult job. You are in this position 24 hours a day. She does not allow laziness and irresponsibility.