<p>We had a rule of no tv or electronics (that was Game Boy for our oldest) Sunday afternoon through Thursday night. It’s much easier for a kid to understand and for a parent to enforce. It encourages reading and active, imaginative play.</p>
<p>Start piano lessons early. </p>
<p>Snap Circuits and Robotics for his Christmas and Birthday presents. The world is a complex place and a kid with a good understanding of electronics can go a long way.</p>
<p>Read, read, read…you read…he reads! Also I’m big on schedules/structure. Set aside a time for studying every day and make sure you and he stick to it. You don’t need to supervise, but keep the path clear for your son. During that time, if he doesn’t have homework have him read or you read with him. After school, after dinner, before dinner, whatever fits your family. The time might need to vary both in placement in the day as well as amount of time as the years go on, but if it’s a non-negotiable in your family - this study time, his friends will understand and it will be a huge benefit over the long haul.</p>
<p>All great ideas here. I will add listen to him. Ask him questions about school, about friends, about his feelings and thoughts. You can tell him about your own daily experiences too. Keep the communication line open and make it a habit to talk about things happening during the day for both of you. He will know that you are always there to love and support him.</p>
<p>read, read, read some more. leaders are people with people skills, and you don’t get those from a screen.</p>
<p>make mistakes. lots of them. tolerate and embrace them because that’s how things are learned. don’t aim for “perfect” , aim for “excellence”</p>
<p>and most of all, learn from plants: you can water, weed, fertilize, you can shelter, stake and tie, you can prune and pot and repair and spray — but if you are trying to nurture your pine tree and what you really have is a beach rose (or the other way around) you are doomed and so is that poor stunted beach rose. Let your children be who they are, and encourage THAT, not what you want (or find acceptable, or prestigious, or whatever)</p>
<p>A couple things. First off, get to know your child. Work together at finding out what works best <em>FOR THEM.</em> What kids want and need in school varies. How kids study best varies. Some might want a desk others work sprawled out on the floor. Some need to reset after school before charging into new work. Others want to jump right into it. Some do best in project based schools others long for the traditional structure. Try some things and don’t be afraid of them failing. As long as you are paying attention and flexible, you can make changes and things will be OK.</p>
<p>Let your kids struggle. Don’t race home for every paper they forgot on the table. Don’t do their homework for them. If they procrastinate and end up having either nothing to turn in or junk… well, let them pay the school consequences for it. Believe me, elementary and middle school grades don’t count for much and THIS really is the time to learn all those lessons. Internal motivation is extremely important and can’t be developed if mom is pushing kid externally. I can’t tell you how much spoon-feeding of teenagers I see even among friends and it continues into college if not kept in check!</p>
<p>Help your kid find out what they are good at whether it’s sports, robotics, theatre, music or basket weaving. Let them get good and go as far as they can with it. Just make sure they are driving the bus. There will be some failed activities that get abandoned and that’s to be expected when you are exploring the world… otherwise, we’d all still be playing T-ball and the flute lol. </p>
<p>Understand that a passionate learner isn’t always getting the best grades. They tend to take intellectual risks which we WANT but might mean they get a “B” or even a “C” on occasion. There is a difference between being a good leader and just being bossy and controlling. Sometimes, kids have traits that make them difficult children but really awesome adults… basically, don’t push too hard to conform them.</p>
<p>I agree with the previous posts about reading and prioritizing HW. Later on I think you can also put some time into math - mental calculations, adding up prices in the store, which is the best cost per ounce. We have a game called 24 we play in the car (available through game stores) which gives 4 numbers and you have to perform calculations to get the total to 24.</p>
<p>I don’t have children but I am academically successful. The most important things my parents did for me (from my perspective): </p>
<p>-READING. My parents were not academic but wanted better for me. They read, read, read, and read some more with me. I love reading. They also never pushed me to read this or that, it was always what I wanted to read. </p>
<p>-Have fun. Too many academic high-achievers have the mentality of work, work, work and they lose sight of important things. My parents kept a really good balance between the two and, though it would horrify many parents here, even let me skip class every once in a while to do something fun. </p>
<p>-Support. I knew, no matter what, I had their support. I was never afraid to tell them that I was struggling or that I got a bad grade because I never faced punishment for any of it. It was always a mentality of “OK, that happened, what can we do about it?” In the long run, it has conditioned me to not be upset about bad grades but rather used them as an opportunity to reevaluate what I should be doing. </p>
<p>-Independence. Ultimately, everything was on me. They never pushed me to do homework. They never asked how I was doing on a project. If I forgot an assignment, it was on me and I had to deal with the consequences. If I needed help, they were absolutely there for me, but they didn’t offer it unless I asked first. </p>
<p>Obviously, kids are different, especially one with ADHD so I can’t speak to that. However, I think it’s really, really important to let kids be kids. Have some fun time every day, even if that means electronics. I’m convinced that in elementary school, I learned WAY more from the Sims than I did from school.</p>
<p>I strongly agree with Asians : " American culture tends to attribute good grades to talent, while Asian to hard work" Talent will carry very few geniuses who also happened to be very hard workers (I do not know any exception here). Hard work will always result in reaching any reasonalble goal. Hence, my message: always do your homework, on time and correctly, and you will have your A. It works like a charm, time and again.</p>
<p>…sorry, could not push Reading too much, not a reader myself. However, D. was interested …until HS, Literature classes just killed off her interest (most likely for the rest of her life). But she always enjoyed writing, very strong writer and this skill is a great advantage in every single class. Cannot make them write though, they are initiators here.</p>
<p>Foster curiosity, read to him, talk to him, listen to him. </p>
<p>Don’t worry if he isn’t a top a academic performer now, or if he is never a tippy top performer. He should be interested in learning, and willing to work hard to be successful. </p>
<p>The best mother of boys I ever knew was a woman who had two very active, relatively difficult sons. Older son was gruff and stubborn, but bright. Younger son was probably ADD, but had a strong desire to please. That mom worked with the kids academically, of course, but more importantly, she had them play hard outside for hours every day. She let them climb trees and build treehouses and experiment with pulleys and ropes. They rode bikes and played in the woods and in creeks. The boys weren’t very bookish, but they did well in school, I think, because she fostered such curiosity and problem solving in them. I couldn’t hold a candle to her. </p>
<p>I am a lazier mom with easier kids. A few things I did right: model interest in the world as evidenced by reading and exploring, really listen to the kids and try to understand what is going on with them. I wanted them to know someone cared about what they thought and felt.
I did hold them to high standards, despite my empathy and interest in their lives. They were expected to do their best academically and behaviorally.</p>
<p>Severely limit TV time. Smartest thing my pediatrician told me when my kids were two years old. I did let them watch a little, but only educational TV. And can’t emphasize enough what most have said. Read to him at bedtime and any other time you can manage.
Set some rules about when homework must be done and stick to it! Go to the library and take books out so that he can pick all kinds of books that look interesting to him.</p>
<p>“Severely limit TV time”
<p>Thanks for the great suggestions all! We’re doing a lot of them. We usually do homework after dinner and bath. After he spends 7 hours at school having to sit still and stay within a structured schedule, he needs some time to run and have free play for a while. His homework is pretty simple at this point. He gets a worksheet each week with 4 activities to practice his spelling words. They are all due on Friday. We do one activity a night Mon-Thurs. It takes about 10 minutes. Then we read. We’ve been reading a chapter a night of Harry Potter, but he doesn’t seem to be able to stay engaged through the whole chapter, so I may need to break it down further. </p>
<p>I was never a good student, but I’ve always been of above average intelligence. When I did an assignment, I could get a good grade with little effort. My problem in primary school was not doing my homework and in college (the first time) it was not going to class. I just didn’t have any motivation to do well. I want to make sure he does. </p>
<p>I do talk about college like it’s a given. He’s said he wants to be a Gator like me and I tell him that he has to do well in school, do all his homework and study hard if he wants to do that. So far he likes school and he enjoys doing well on things. He does get frustrated and wants to stop trying if something is difficult. I can totally relate though.</p>
<p>I do need to work on limiting screen time. He spends more time than he should watching TV or playing Mine Craft on the tablet. We are at home a lot though because I don’t have a lot of money to put him in sports or other activities. We do have farm animals at home though (goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs and cats) and he learns a lot about them. He also participates in 4H.</p>
<p>Read to/ with him. Make regular visits to your public library. Make sure that he see you reading. Look around for any cultural programs - museums, community theater productions, etc. a lot of the local ones are free or low cost. Play board games together.</p>
<p>talk about college. not all of the time, but let your son know that you expect him to be attending college after high school.</p>
<p>Sell the TV.</p>
<p>If reading becomes a recreational or fun activity for him, then learning will become that much easier. Keep books and magazines around the house and/or make frequent trips to the library. Pay attention to what he is interested in and get reading material on the subjects he is interested in (e.g. if he is interested in the farm animals, gets some books about those animals so that he can read them).</p>
<p>I can’t tell you how much satisfaction it brings me to see pretty much everyone on this thread emphasize reading. If someone asked me what was the one thing we did to maximize our daughters’ educational experience, it would be reading. We continued to read to them years after they were reading on their own. It then became a bonding experience. </p>
<p>And talking to them about when they will go to college… not ‘if’. I don’t even think they were into middle school yet when we started doing drive-bys of colleges, if we were in an area that had them.</p>
<p>Adequate sleep and a bedtime routine. Limited screen time. Delayed gratification (it takes time to master a skill, and he can learn when he’s young by having to wait or save up for the things he wants). Non-scripted toys (building sets, for example, rather than toys that talk and use batteries). Plenty of outdoor exercise, preferably non-structured. Your good example of reading and diligent work. Values and discipline (learn to say no now and it will be easier when he’s 16).</p>
<p>As he gets older and his homework becomes more intensive, ALWAYS make sure there’s time in the day to get it done. This helps to reinforce its importance. </p>
<p>My kids were allowed to do their homework after dinner if they didn’t want to do it right after school, but they had to start immediately after dinner (and I found it necessary to set a limit on how long they could dawdle over dinner). Also, if they had somewhere to go in the evening (for example, my son had Cub Scouts in the evening), then homework had to be done right after school.</p>
<p>When my son was in high school, he worked in a retail store. My husband and I did not allow him to work on Monday through Thursday because he could not put in a six-hour shift and also have time to get homework done. We insisted that he ask for only Friday, Saturday, or Sunday shifts during the school year (and his boss agreed). </p>
<p>We also never took kids out of school for family vacations. That would have been contrary to our family values – which clearly stated that school comes second only to health and safety. My two may be the only young people in America who have never been to Disney World. That’s OK with me.</p>
<p>I even refused to let one of my kids go to her grandfather’s funeral because it conflicted with standardized testing at her school. (I did let the other kid go, even though it meant missing a day of school, because his grade had no testing scheduled that day.) In retrospect, I may have gone a little too far that time.</p>
<p>I agree with the reading. My 7th grade daughter still sits on the other end of the couch and reads to me several times a week. Neither of us watch t.v., so that leaves plenty of time for other things. She already met the district annual goal of one million words (which I believe to be woefully inadequate) last week. As my daughter says, every book takes you on an adventure to another place!</p>