May 14, 2004 -- Want to help your struggling child perform bett
May 14, 2004 -- Want to help your struggling child perform better in school? New research shows that the best thing you can do is to back off.
The study shows that parents who scolded or punished their poor performing kids, or who intervened in a controlling way -- by, for example, demanding better grades or doing the work themselves -- only made matters worse. The children performed best when parents offered positive support, but did not intervene.
Researchers concluded that encouraging independent problem solving is one of the best ways to help a struggling child perform better.
"The parents of underachievers are naturally the ones who are most likely to express irritation or try to fix things in a controlling way," study author Eva Pomerantz, PhD, tells WebMD. "But it is especially important for these parents to find positive ways to address their children's behavior."
Encouragement Helps
Pomerantz and researcher Florrie Fei-Yin Ng examined the immediate and long-term impact of parental behaviors on their children's performance. Their findings are reported in the May/June 2004 issue of the journal Child Development.
In one study, 110 mothers with children in grade school were observed as they helped their kids with a simulated homework task. Researchers found that when mothers assisted in a controlling manner by directing their children's behavior, children who initially performed the task poorly became disengaged and did even worse in later attempts. Struggling children tended to do better at the task when their mothers offered autonomous support, such as discussing the problem but letting the child work it out on their own.
In a second study, the researchers recorded the "real life" successes and failures of 121 children and their mothers' reactions to them for two weeks. They found that children who performed poorly in school, for example, were more likely to perform poorly the next day if their mothers responded in a controlling way, such as punishing them or expressing disappointment. Six months later, these children's grades were also lower, while the grades of struggling children tended to improve if their mothers responded with autonomous support.
High Achievers
While maternal behavior strongly influenced the short- and long-term performance of low-achieving kids, this did not appear to be the case for kids who did well in school.
"It appears that high-achieving children are already very confident, and not so sensitive to reprimand or other controlling influences as far as scholastic achievement was concerned," Ng tells WebMD. "But these behaviors probably do negatively impact these children in other ways."
The researchers conclude that encouraging independent problem solving is uniquely beneficial for poor- performing children because it helps them attain badly needed confidence.
"These children may have an unfulfilled need to feel competent; parents' use of control further aggravates this need, whereas their use of autonomy support allows children to fulfill it," the researchers wrote.
