Getting to the bottom of it: How to help your teen sort out the REAL reasons for their study woes
Getting to the bottom of it: How to help your teen sort out the REAL reasons for their study woes
Unpicking the four most common study complaints of struggling teenagers.
Hi there,
Teens who are struggling with studying are often grappling with similar issues: a lack of motivation, not getting the grades they want, feeling stressed and anxious. You know the drill.
When a teenager asks me for help with issues like these the first thing I usually have to do is ask them for more information.
This is because before I can help I need to identify what the root cause is, as these common study issues are usually just the symptoms of deeper underlying study issues.
Likewise, if your teen is battling with study issues like those above, you too will need to get out your excavation shovel to dig down deeper in order to help them figure out what the real problem is.
But you don’t have to do it alone!
Today I have put together a list of what I often find are the big 4 common study complaints, alongside what the real issue(s) might be.
I hope that this will help you and your teen identify what’s really going on with their study struggle. This is absolutely key, because it’s only once your teen knows the reason why they’re struggling that they can actually do something about it.
“I’m not motivated”
A few different things could be going on here.
What’s their ‘why’?
If your teen isn’t particularly forward-looking, they might have no idea what they want to do when they leave school and so have no incentive driving them to work through the short term ‘pain’ of studying in order to achieve any longer term ‘gains’.
When I was at high school I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do when I ‘grew up’, but I was interested in science and thought something in that general area would probably appeal, so I did want to have good enough grades to go to university.
If this is not the case for your teen, I would try and talk to them about what reasons could become their ‘why’ for trying hard at school. Perhaps it’s going to uni, maybe it’s getting a good job, maybe it’s having decent enough grades that they keep their options open after school.
No clue how to study?
Aside from not having longer term goals to motivate them, your teen’s motivation-itis might also be because they don’t know how to study; they have no idea what to do once they sit down at their desk. Their mind goes blank.
I think this is the case for so many teens. They’re told they have to study for exams, but if studying doesn’t come naturally to them, how the hell are they supposed to know what to do?!
And there is nothing more unmotivating than having what feels like a gigantic, overwhelming task ahead of you and you don’t know where to start or how to tackle it. We all know that feeling, regardless of age.
If this resonates, your teen needs to start developing their Study System. They need to start figuring out what study techniques work for them.
I suggest you lead them to my Study System page pronto. You can help them work through the 8 free teen-friendly printouts, each one covering a different aspect of how to study. These printouts are essentially the ‘blueprint’ of the way I used to go about studying so that your teen can start by following my very own general Study System but then build upon and adapt to suit their study style.
“I am studying but not getting good grades”
Sometimes teens DO put in the effort, or at least some effort, but don’t see it reflected in their results. Super demoralising.
Not studying effectively
In this case, chances are your teen isn’t studying in a way that’s actually tried and tested to work for them.
There is no one way to study. What might work for their friend might not work for your teen at all.
And that’s the whole point of Cram Lab — to help your teen figure out what their unique method of studying is — what is their Study System?
It is essential that your teen’s method / process of studying is not just going through the motions of opening up their books, writing a few half-arsed study notes and expecting that to yield any significant results.
Consistently good results can only come from your teen having actually processed and retained information. And unfortunately there usually aren’t any short-cuts.
A couple of other things could be going on too.
Focusing on the wrong stuff
It could be that your teen is focusing on the wrong topics, or spending too much time on what I call peripheral topics, instead of the essential key topics.
To some extent getting good grades is about playing ‘the game’. You have to be smart about how you approach your study. You have to think about what the exam is going to examine you on and focus on the tasks and topics that are most likely to yield the greatest number of marks.
Sometimes teens get lost among the weeds when they’re studying — they get bogged down in the detail of stuff that doesn’t really matter — when what they should be doing is spending most of their precious study time on those big important headline topics that are more or less guaranteed to come up in the exam. Spending two hours on something their teacher mentioned once in passing is not a good use of time…
Forgetting the point… the exam!
The other thing that teens often overlook is the exam itself. Heartbreakingly, some teens work really hard leading up to the exam, do lots of study, and do actually understand their topics, but they go into the exam without any kind of strategy.
As I said above, you gotta play ‘the game’, and the exam itself is where playing the game is critical.
Your teen has to have an exam stategy. The essence of an exam strategy is making the best use of their limited amount of time in the exam to get most marks possible.
This means doing things like answering all of the easier questions first; not wasting time on a hard question to the expense of easier questions your teen could have answered; spending an appropriate amount of time on questions / sections depending on their weighting; making sure the clock doesn’t run out on them before they’ve answered everything they could have.
(For a deeper dive on exam strategy check out this previous article.)
“I’m overwhelmed and stressed”
No study plan
This very common study complaint usually means your teen doesn’t have a study plan.
Whether your teen has an assignment to complete, just needs to do some homework, or is launching upon the mammoth task of exam study, the key to not getting overwhelmed by the task ahead is to have a PLAN.
Without a plan, your teen is staring down the barrel of potentially a lot of work to do and doesn’t know where to start or where to go next. Again, super demoralising.
My top tip is that whenever your teen sits down to study, they make a little plan for how they’re going to use that 1 / 2 / 3 hours of study time. It could just be answering 20 practice questions. It might be starting an essay assignment by writing an Essay Plan and at least two paragraphs. The plan can be very simple; there just needs to be one.
A godsend — the Exam Study Timetable
When it comes to exam study, the way I used to mitigate my exam stress was to make an Exam Study Timetable. This would allow me to see that there was in fact time to cover everything.
It took the huge to-do list out of my head and onto paper, and so it stopped occupying so much real estate in my mind. I felt enormous relief from knowing that if I just followed the timetable, I would get through it all.
“I can’t concentrate when I try to study”
This one is a bit tricky because the root cause could be one of so many different things.
That bloody mobile phone?
It could be something superficial like phone use — your teen not being able to tear themselves away from their phone for more than 2 minutes. If this is the culprit, the phone needs to go. Not forever, just for the length of time of the study session.
The way to sell this to your teen is, isn’t it preferable to smash out an hour of productive study rather than spend two hours not really making any progress? No one is immune from feeling super satisfied after smashing out a productive study session.
It could also be something more substantial.
No plan
I think that the cause is often that teens are heading into a study session without a plan.
Similarly to the points above, it is really demoralising to face a task like studying without a plan to help you work your way through it.
Without a plan, what is your teen doing? What task are they going to focus their mind on? And when should they stop?
But introduce a super simple plan, like the ones discussed in the previous section, and all of a sudden there are steps to follow and there is an endpoint in sight.
Part of your teen’s plan needs to be how long their study session is. Most study help sites will tell you that students can only concentrate for 30 minutes before you need a break, and this might be the case for your teen, but we are not all the same, and students all study most effectivey in their own unique way (Study System!).
So your teen needs to figure out what their optimal study ‘chunk’ length of time is.
Maybe it is 30 minutes, maybe it’s 2 hours! Also, this can change. Some days your teen might be hitting a mental block every twenty minutes, while other days they might find their groove and find that two hours has gone by before they check the time.
Let’s remember we are all human and all have good days and bad days. The same applies to studying.
Studying mindfully
The point is for your teen to be cognisant of their level of focus. Are they being productive? Are they getting distracted? What would help? A quick study break? A little walk to clear out the cobwebs?
What we want to avoid is your teen sitting at their desk, without a plan, feeling despondent, and losing focus and motivation before they’ve even started.
I could go on and on about each of these common study complaints and had to stop myself writing more, but I hope I have at least illustrated the point I am trying to get across — that if your teen is struggling to study and talks about one or more of the common complaints above, then the reason why they are struggling is probably something deeper and more specific, and your job is to help them identify what the REAL cause(s) of their study woes is.
Once the real issue is identified, you can do something about. And once your teen is at that point, it should be onwards and upwards, because as I keep on saying, effective study can be simple, and anyone can learn study skills to help them get the grades they are actually capable of.
Wishing you and your teen the best of luck.
Clare