I should be the bigger person and refrain from pointing out that I've told his teachers since preschool that this was going to happen....but I'm not that mature.Heheheh... yeah. Me, too.
She needed to get her butt kicked. Sure enough, this year she has much better focus, better study skills, organizes her homework time independently, and isn't plagued by perfectionism.
Yes, this has also been our experience. AP Lit (along with one teacher who is a total.. er... well, the polite term is "barracuda" here), and AP physics have been the first real occasions where our DD has truly had to do HER BEST in order to have reasonable results.
He's never had to work hard at anything? Sports? Music? Legos?
If he's never worked hard at anything, it might be a personality characteristic.
If it's that he doesn't get satisfaction out of working hard to master something, then you can teach it, but it takes time. And it takes things that really are hard that you can coach him through. Use methods he enjoys-- racing you or a clock, applying his artistic flair, using his hands, having you read to him and quiz him, etc.
Agreed-- although this
can be at least partially a conditioned response, we've found. We've
really had to push things that DD isn't "automatically" extraordinarily GOOD at... i.e., things where results more or less reflect effort, I mean.
We've tried a lot of different things, and yes, some of it is innate personality. DD simply likes to
be good at things. Not to 'achieve' mastery-- but to POSSESS it. It is a subtle distinction, but it's an important one. It's the same root as task-avoidant perfectionism, and the basic fuel that it runs on is a self-identity built around "competence/mastery" rather than rapid or deep LEARNING.
We eventually gave up on school doing this teaching, incidentally. They simply never saw the problem, which boggles my mind, but anyway...
We used music lessons, dog obedience/showmanship (animal training is GREAT for teaching task persistence and acceptance), and swimming.
We also have to be willing to accept that some of those activities, SHE may decide that she doesn't care about real "excellence" but "good enough" instead. That has to be okay with us-- the important thing is that sustained effort and proportional results.
My kid is a sprinter by nature-- and mostly, life is built around rewarding border collies and not cheetahs...
So we've worked on sustaining EFFORT even when MOTIVATION wanes.
I'd also like to reiterate that some of this is maturity. It's amazing how different kids are between 6, 10, and 14. I'm assuming that the same will hold true at 16 or 18, too, though we're not there yet.
