5 ways to help your teenager with school and studying

Simple, practical and effective study techniques you can help your teen with at home.

Is your teen unmotivated about school and studying? Perhaps they’re not getting the grades you know they’re capable of?

I want to help give parents the tools they need to help their teens with their study, and there are a lot of different ways parents can help. Today I want to focus on 5 simple ways parents can help get their teen on the right study path.

1. Help your teen make a study timetable for the week

Let’s start off with something simple and tangible.

Helping your teen to make a study timetable for their typical school week can be a god-send:

• Your teen is much more likely to study and complete homework when they have scheduled time to do so in advance. Having a study timetable makes your teen accountable for their time.

• They reduce stress levels. Yours and your teen’s. When the week is planned out in advance, everyone know what’s happening that week and when. There are far fewer surprises. In other words, everyone is better organised.

• They encourage the development of good study habits. Making and sticking to a study timetable will help your teen get used to studying regularly.

This article contains specific instructions on how to help your teen make a weekly study timetable.

2. Get the most out of incentives

The key with incentives is to base them on the work your teenager puts in, and not the grades they end up getting.

Inputs are to be rewarded rather than outputs.

For instance, rewarding your teen at the end of every week that they complete however many hours of study they said they would. A less effective incentive would be basing an incentive on your teen getting, say, a B grade average in their exams.

This is because your teen can’t directly control what grades they end up getting, but they can control how much effort they put in to get them.

An exam could be much harder than expected, grades to an extent can depend on the examiner, something might happen in the exam that your teen couldn’t have foreseen — and so for all of these types of reasons, it’s not fair or effective to base an incentive on a specific outcome.

And, basing incentives on outcomes is much less likely to motivate your teen.

Because your teen can’t exactly control what grades they get, striving to get particular grades is an intangible goal. They can’t see the carrot dangling right in front of them like they can with an incentive based on their inputs.

This means that when they get home from school, the idea that they might get a reward if they get certain grades, which they might not get anyway, because who can predict something so specific, is unlikely to provide them with the motivation they need to head to their desk to crunch out a couple of hours of decent study.

Whereas knowing that they’ll be rewarded as soon as, say, the end of the week, if they head to their desk and study, is going to be MUCH more motivating to the average teenager.

3. Encourage, don’t nag

Nagging might work when you’re asking your teen to help with chores around the house. But when it comes to their education, nagging is highly unlikely to provide your teenager with the motivation and inspiration they need to reach their academic potential.

Your teen’s grades will benefit the most if their motivation comes from within.

So what can you do to encourage your teen rather than nag them about their homework and studying?

Firstly, applying the first two points above — helping them make a study timetable and using incentives — are a great start.

Beyond those things, here are a few other suggestions:

• Discuss with your teen what they’re good at and how this could inform what they might do after high school.

• Encourage your teen to focus on the positive outcomes of studying and trying your best — more opportunities after high school, better employment prospects etc. Your teen might be focusing only on the negatives of studying right now (it’s hard, it can be boring etc).

• Help your teen realise that high school is not forever, because it CAN seem like forever when you’re a teen, which is a big part of the motivation problem for a lot of students. They can’t see beyond the tip of their nose, which means they can’t see beyond high school and therefore can’t readily appreciate the importance of high school.

• Help them find study techniques that they enjoy more and find effective.

4. Ask questions about what your teen is learning and what they’re going to be examined on

Your teen shouldn’t feel like they’re being nagged when you’re asking about what they’re learning. You could pitch the idea as a useful study technique — which it most certainly is.

As I have said with respect to improving memory retention I found discussing what I had been studying and what questions were likely to come up in the days leading up to an exam invaluable to my exam success. This is something you can help your teen with.

This technique helps to consolidate what you have studied and therefore improves memory retention as well.

It also makes it very apparent which topics you don’t quite understand well enough yet, because if you can’t explain something clearly to someone, chances are it’s because you don’t understand it well enough.

This exercise is also more interactive than a lot of other study techniques, and so your teen might find it a lot more engaging than simply reading or writing study notes in isolation.

5. Consider private tutoring

This one is not a must, but if it’s an option for your family private tutoring is probably worth investigating.

I had a terrible chemistry teacher for my last year at high school, which was most unfortunate because up until that point I had enjoyed the subject and done reasonably well at it — AND I wanted to get good grades to get into Biomedical Science.

I had a few tutoring lessons with a university student who knew her stuff and it was fantastic. She cleared up concepts for me that I had been struggling with for weeks. (Also this was before YouTube so resources weren’t as plentiful!)

Sometimes even a one off hour with a tutor can work wonders, and help your teen reach a level of understanding that might have taken them weeks to reach on their own.

One step at a time

Implementing the ideas above probably won’t change your teen’s grades or outlook on study overnight, particularly if your teen is really unmotivated about school.

But getting your teen’s study on track is going to be a journey, for both of you. And it might involve the entire family changing some habits and implementing new routines.

This is important to keep in mind, because we don’t want your teen (or you!) to get disheartened. Your focus should always be on progress, not perfection.

If there are any particuar things you are doing at home with your teen to help them, let us know in the comments below. I and hundreds of other parents in the same situation would love to hear what’s working (and what’s not) for your family.

Thanks so much for reading.

Clare