Child hates school

Parent Cafe
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<p>Wise parents,</p>

<p>My sweet, smart, talented 8th grade daughter absolutely hates school. We have never experienced this with our other children, who always seemed perfectly happy to go off to school every day. She has basically been complaining about school since elementary school, but this year is something much more profound and debilitating.</p>

<p>There are no social issues. D is not being bullied, has many friends.</p>

<p>The issues are boredom, frustration, anxiety about academic performance and too much homework. She goes to a very academically challenging public middle school and it is not out of the norm for her to have four to five tests, an essay or two on top of daily homework. She spend four hours a night on homework (crying and stressing the whole time). I have talked to her teacher, guidance counselor, etc. to no avail. They say that she shouldn’t spend more than a half hour per subject, but if she did that (tried, not successfully), they still hold her accountable for what she did not finish. She stays in for extra help and lunch and often after school. She complains that lunch is the only time to see friends, but that there is always something to have clarified by the teachers then.</p>

<p>D complains that the day is too long, the teachers don’t teach (they expect the kids to read and answer questions, and she says it is too hard to teach herself). There seems to be constant regurgitation of material on tests that they have only just learned. She says there is no time to absorb the information before going on to the next topic, and then it is just more memorization for a test, without really learning anything.</p>

<p>What to do about a child who complains that she hates school everyday, that the clock moves so slowly that her day feels like torture, that none of her teachers are fun or interesting, that her work is tedious and too much? </p>

<p>I am at my wit’s end. There are still three months of school left, and I don’t know how to help her just get through. I disagree with this level of homework and busywork. I have told her to just do less, but the level of competition with the other students is very high, and she is dissatisfied with B’s and C’s. However, often she can work and work and still get a B. </p>

<p>This isn’t an issue with motivation—it clearly just seems like a bad fit with her and these teachers, but truthfully, she has always complained about school. She just wants school to be more “fun”, more interactive, more interesting, which it isn’t. Buck up and deal? I worry she is just too anxious and the anxiety is emotionally unhealthy. It is making me feel sick on a daily basis to have her so anxious and unhappy.</p>

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<p>Delta66, we had a similar problem when my daughter was in middle school. She attended a very competative high school and completed 5-6 hours of homework every day in 8th grade. We rarely saw her at the dinner table as she was in her room doing homework, she was targeted for 5 pre-AP classes in 9th grade, each claiming to require 1 hour of homework a night. I spoke to the counsellor and told them that since she got out of school at 4:00 she did not have tiime for 5 hours of homework each night, they told me to work it out. We did, we moved to a much smaller school, still competative but one that allowed students to be kids as well. My daughter will graduate in May, she will go to college a much happier child that has had a chance to explore areas of interest. She is the student body president, has earned a 35 on her ACT and is well prepared for college. If you recognize that the school is filling your childs day with busy work and stress you might investigate transferring to another school. My daughter has kept up with her old middle school friends and they remain stressed and unhappy. The move was hard on our family (longer commute to work, new friends etc) but they have allowed both my kids to thrive. Good luck.</p>

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<p>Yes, get her out of there, NOW!</p>

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<p>Delta- Don’t know if this is helpful, but middle school stinks! It just does. D had a relatively smooth time, but S is in 8th grade now and I am counting the days until the end. Just keep reminding her that it is almost over. Is she excited about high school? It sounds to me like she needs a change.
Also, the MS here is very academic and competitive, but neither of mine spent 4/5 hours per night on homework. That is way too much. I suggest you talk to the principal about this. Enlist other parents if you need to.</p>

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<p>The amount of time your daughter is spending on homework is excessive for a MS student. Since she has been complaining about schoolwork for many years, it is time to get her an evaluation for previously undiagnosed learning disabilities. There easily could be a dyslexia situation here.</p>

<p>And, since she is so miserable, you should also be considering other schools (including home schooling) for her.</p>

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<p>If you have a kid who is absolutely miserable in a situation like that and the high school she will be going to next year is equally as rigorous, you may want to take the advice of some of the other posters and begin to look into alternatives for schooling. That kind of schooling can be excellent for one student and debilitating and life draining for another…nothing to do with intelligence, just approach to life, in general.</p>

<p>I feel for you, though. You don’t want to spend the next four years like this. Good luck.</p>

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<p>Yes, I would echo the thought of exploring other schools. The amount of time she is spending on homework at this level is too much, IMO. I think you should find her a different school that is a better fit for her personality!</p>

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<p>She has a choice to make - C’s with some free time to enjoy, or more stress. I would really push getting Cs for the duration of this school year as a stress reducer.</p>

<p>Does the school have a social worker you can consult? Your D can’t be the only one suffering under this amount of work.</p>

<p>Is she creative? My D (and I) would have died with that amount of homework. She never did take APs in HS, took media tech, art, choir, etc. in addition to honors classes in her strength areas and managed to maintain a love of learning.</p>

<p>I agree with getting an evaluation for ADD or LD, but that may not be the problem. Good luck!</p>

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<p>One of my biggest regrets is bugging my kids about their grades in middle school. As long as a child is actively learning, it really doesn’t matter what the report card says. Save caring about grades for later.</p>

<p>I agree with Treetopleaf. Encourage her to relax and be satisfied with C’s.</p>

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<p>Well, getting Cs in 8th grade may sometimes mean not getting to take certain classes in 9th grade, which may or may not be a problem, depending on the student.</p>

<p>I agree that this school seems like a bad “fit”, but since there is only 2 months left, and she will change schools anyway, I’d tell her to stick it out (unless the HS is more of the same in your experience, in which case looking for a different HS may be warranted).</p>

<p>I am not sure that it is helpful to judge the school by the amount of time your student spends on her homework, btw. I have 3 kids who went through the same school system, earning the same grades, and getting almost the same scores on standardized tests. One of them seemed to spend every waking moment on hw, elementary school through hs. The other two had plenty of free time.</p>

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<p>Thank you for the responses. They are very helpful.</p>

<p>D is very creative, loves and excels at projects and hands on learning. I think the school is just a bad fit for her type of learning profile. I doubt there is any LD, but obviously don’t know for sure, since we have never had any reason to test her. SHe has always been a straight A student.</p>

<p>I would be totally fine with C’s (and have told her). She does not want C’s because the students are all so competitive with each other and compare grades. She doesn’t want to feel “stupid” compared to them. We’ve told her to quite worrying about that, but it’s easier said than done.</p>

<p>The private schools around my area are just as competitive, if not more so, than her current setting (and I think the high school could be deadly for her too, although she is set to go, with only one honors course, so I think that will be ok). If I thought she’d be a good homeschooler, we might consider it, but she is social, loves her friends, and the ECs at school (yearbook, chorus, etc). She is not self-motivated enough to read a huge book on her own, but will do it if a teacher (not her mother) requires it.</p>

<p>I think relaxing and being OK with C’s is the answer, but she is so competitive with herself, with such high standards, I don’t think she will stop pushing herself to the point of ridiculousness. I have thought about whether I could send her half days, etc. Are there other legal options? I know I can’t just pull her out of school or the truant officers
will come and get us.</p>

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<p>This is precisely why my husband wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until college.</p>

<p>PS-- Tell her not to use any coping mechanisms on the test… My brother STILL isn’t diagnosed because he always ‘hacks’ the standard LD tests that they give him. He’s working on his PhD in electrical engineering, but if you put a second grader’s word search in front of him, he absolutely cannot do it. He’ll stare at it for hours. (In second grade, he’d cope by writing a computer program to solve it for him. Bless his teachers; they said that was a perfectly valid way to solve it.) My husband, on the other hand, is brilliant at word searches but avoids unnecessary reading at all costs.</p>

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<p>Oh, Delta66, I could have written your post (acutally, I think I did, last year.) My smart, talented 8th grade D also hates school - she says nothing interests her. She also finds being tested for a grade highly objectionable. (Her logic is appealing…just test to see if the students know the material, if so, move on without a grade, if not, reteach without a grade.) </p>

<p>She loves physical activity/sports of all kinds She was a gymnast for about 8 years. What is funny is that everyone says that the time consuming, super-demanding sports like gymnastics teach great qualities like perseverance. Well, D has perseverance, but only in sports - it didn’t translate into anything academically.</p>

<p>My D gets low As to mid Bs because she just won’t put in the time for better grades. Sometimes I feel like I should push her more, but this is my third child and I know that middle school grades don’t mean a lot.</p>

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<p>That is way, way too much homework. If there are truly no private schools with a more relaxed curriculum, I’d seriously consider homeschooling.</p>

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<p>Delta I am going to PM you, please check your box.</p>

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<p>She goes to a very academically challenging public middle school and it is not out of the norm for her to have four to five tests, an essay or two on top of daily homework. **She spend four hours a night on homework <a href=“crying%20and%20stressing%20the%20whole%20time”>/B</a>. I have talked to her teacher, guidance counselor, etc. to no avail. They say that she shouldn’t spend more than a half hour per subject, but if she did that (tried, not successfully), they still hold her accountable for what she did not finish.</p>

<p>Get her out of that school. If that’s not possible, please ask the teachers to do the following… Ask them if they will ask each student to write on the top of their papers how long it took them to do each assignment. </p>

<p>We had a teacher do this and she was shocked to find out that what she thought was a “20 minute assignment” really was a 3-4 hour assignment (and this is a smart teacher!) She actually had used the words…the students can “knock the assignment out in 20 minutes.”</p>

<p>I think sometimes teachers don’t realize how long their assignments take. If a teachers asks all students to indicate the time it takes to complete, sure there might be some untruthful students out there, but there should be enough honest students (ranging from top students to avg students) for a teacher to get a fair assessment of how long each assignment takes.</p>

<p>Do you mean that it’s not usual for her to be studying for 4-5 tests the next day? If so, that school tests too often.</p>

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<p>I remember one time when our older D was in 7th grade, she was stressed about how much homework she had. She was slaving away forever on a WORD SEARCH for Science. We ended up passing it around for every member of our family to do. There was one word that none of the five of us could find! It took HOURS of our collective time to do a WORD SEARCH that the teacher probably thought would be a fun little reinfocement activity.</p>

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<p>Sounds like you have the perfect storm:</p>

<p>School is assigning way too much homework. </p>

<p>Kid is too wrapped up in perfection and academic performance. We lectured our son every year about letting go of his perfectionism. Suddenly in 8th grade he got the picture and swung way over in the other direction. Thankfully he seemed to find a balance in hs and now in college. He works really hard in the classes he cares about and has figured out how to do the minimum amount of work to get a marginally acceptable grade in the classes he doesn’t care about.</p>

<p>Finally, I can’t emphasize how helpful you will find a full neuropsychological workup to be. Get her in right away. I took my son in to be tested as a soph in hs mostly to get him to stop complaining. I thought that there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about him and that he was just comparing himself a few super-stars in his class. Was I ever surprised - he has a very pronounced visual processing deficit. It’s only because he was such a smart kid and conscientious student that he was able to compensate as well as he had been. While as it turned out his hs didn’t give him any accommodations, the relief and sense of empowerment that he felt by being able to put a name to his problems made the testing the best few hundred dollars I ever spent (it would probably have been paid for by insurance, but I wanted to send him to someone that our insurance wouldn’t have covered, and I also didn’t want to have to explain to the pediatrician why my straight A kid needed to be assessed for learning issues).</p>

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<p>My kids didn’t spend that much time on hw (on a nightly basis) when they were in h.s.
Sounds like way too much.
S2 was always a school hater. Getting homework done was like pulling teeth.
Eighth grade was the absolute worst of his academic life. He was doing so badly that DH and I seriously considered that he may not survive h.s. </p>

<p>H.S. for him turned out to be much better than m.s. He still didn’t love sch. or make many A’s but the bigger environment was so much better for him. Also he played football all the way through. I think it helped a lot to have a non-academic school activity that he liked and was really good at. It gave him more confidence than he had in m.s. which helped his academic side too.<br>
He did manage to grad. from h.s. and is a college soph. now.</p>

<p>Reassure your D that not getting A’s on every single thing will not ruin her life nor disappoint those who love her.</p>

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<p>How much time do her friends spend on homework?
Is she distracted during homework: cell phone, computer, etc.?
I absolutely agree with those who are suggesting testing. Highly intelligent people can compensate for learning differences, and make detection elude the eye. If you find out that your kid is perfectly typical, then at least you know this and you have put it to rest. Or, if you learn that your child is gifted, this also may be important to know so that your child’s needs can be met. Or, you might learn that there is an attentional, processing, working memory, or other problem.
OTOH, if EVERYONE is spending this much time on homework, then the problem is that the teachers and school are completely out of line with their expectations.
Be thankful that there is peer pressure for achievement…it is much worse when there is peer pressure to underachieve.
Could you go to the school and observe? It could be that your child’s take on things will not be the same as yours.
Good luck!</p>