5 Ways to Motivate Your Kids

Motivation

At the start of the new school year, everyone feels motivated—teachers, students and parents.  As the year wears on, however, especially students lose their motivation.  That stresses and concerns parents a lot (In my Middle School Moms FB group unmotivated kids is a topic that comes up fairly often).  And it should concern us because how miserable is it to send our kids off to school every day if they are not arriving happy and eager to learn.

So let’s look at how to motivate kids (and how we can keep from demotivating them).

To Motivate Connect kids to something bigger

Kids are naturally curious.  They come into the world ready to learn.  And, indeed, in an ideal world we would let kids explore their environment at their own pace, exposing them to new ideas and experiences but not pushing learning down their throat.  In that way, they would always approach education as an adventure.  In fact, they wouldn’t know the difference between learning, working and playing as whatever you called it, they would be following their natural inclinations.  Some would gravitate towards observing the natural world, some would start creating or building with their hands, some would be in the middle of wherever people were gathering.  Eventually, they would form some goal or idea bigger than themselves and they would begin to need skills—reading, writing and math skills—to help them accomplish those goals.  And we, their parents and teachers, would be there ready to provide those skills. 

 It’s a wonderful image, but woefully inefficient as it pretty much requires an adult-child ratio that would keep the rest of us from pursuing our own goals. 

 In today’s world, the best we can do is to strike a balance between the things kids have to learn and the things they want to learn.  As much as possible, we want to connect kids’ learning to something bigger and more important.  Something important to them. Schools are under a lot of pressure to cram information into kids for state tests.  Still, there is a lot that you can do at home to provide kids “authentic learning opportunities.” 

Here’s an example of an authentic learning opportunity. This summer we had a young friend come stay with us for a week.  The thank you note she wrote after being here was a thing of beauty.  This girl included lots of detail about why the week was special, what were the things she enjoyed and why she especially appreciated us.  Clearly, she wrote multiple drafts before sending her note off as it was punctuated and spelled correctly, written in neat handwriting and included a drawing related to her time with us.  I’m sure her mom had to get after her some to write the thank you note, and at the same time, she genuinely had a good week and with the promise of getting to come back next summer on the horizon, my guess is that the work felt meaningful and purposeful.

And that’s the key:  When our work has meaning and purpose beyond the moment, that fuels us to push through the boring, hard part of the work.  It is unreasonable to expect our students to be inherently interested in learning, say,  correct grammar.  It is only when they have a reason to communicate effectively that speaking and writing well become worth it. 

To Motivate Recognize where else kids are getting critical skills

Recently, one of my clients was sighing over her teen’s lack of motivation.  Further into the conversation, however, it became apparent that his lack of motivation is only for school.  He is highly motivated by the world of his video games and has become quite sophisticated with the YouTube training videos he has been creating.  These videos demonstrate that he has mastered many critical skills used in academics and in life: task initiation, planning and prioritizing, research, attention to detail, analysis of main ideas vs supporting details, follow through, self-monitoring and organization. 

In fact, if he were producing videos of this quality for his school assignments, he would be getting top grades and making everyone proud.

When we stay too narrowly focused on the path towards college vs our children’s general skill development, we demotivate our students.  By only valuing them when they are checking off boxes towards our goals for them, that sucks any of the interest that the assignment might naturally have had.

To Motivate Help Kids Keep the long view in perspective 

We are the adults.  We have a clear understanding of how the steps our kids are taking today will lead them to more choices and opportunities when they go to college or get out into the working world.  We can’t expect our kids to have the same perspective. Seriously.  Why should kids be motivated to learn their multiplication tables or work long division problems? It is educators’ job to keep the overall balance of the school experience fun and stimulating to give students energy and forward drive.  When students have that, they will accept learning their spelling words along side the chance to build a model of a solar system, dissect a frog or reenact the Spanish Armada.

Unfortunately, we do not have very much control over what is taught in schools or how it is taught.  What we can do as parents is to celebrate and encourage the other ways in which kids can acquire important skills.  Gardening, cooking, organizing, designing, decorating, crafts, home projects, and volunteering all support executive functioning.  Running a lemonade stand or having a bake sale for a cause takes organization, takes math and connects kids to a higher purpose.  When our kids take initiative on their own, they usually sustain interest long enough to follow through.  That takes self-control and self-sacrifice, two essential pro-social skills.  

To Motivate Let Experience Be the Teacher 

For a number of years I was the advisor at the middle school to the Junior Optimists, a service club whose mission was to “advance the well-being of the children in the county.”  The club met at lunch and was completely optional.  It was certainly hoped that kids who signed up would come regularly to meetings, but it was not a rule for being in the club.  That meant every single time a student showed up, it was his choice.

My policy as advisor was that it was my job to keep kids safe and following school rules.  While I did sometime ask questions to help kids think through projects, mostly I kept quiet.  It was their job to organize themselves—to run meetings, to elect officers, to come up with ideas and to execute their ideas.  Over the years I saw kids pull off some pretty wonderful events.  Others were less successful.  But whatever they were, they were the kids’, not mine.  The only credit I took was for providing the space to meet and being their biggest cheerleader.  I had faith that what they tried would work—or at the very least that it was worth trying. 

When my Junior Optimist students went on to high school, they became the leaders on their new campuses.  They founded new clubs, lead existing clubs and served on school committees as student representatives.  They had already had the experience of taking leadership and ownership for how they could make an impact on the world.

By not controlling or designing the experience of Jr. Optimists, I let my students discover what they could achieve on their own.  That gave them the confidence—and the motivation to step up and step forward in their new environments.   

Let ownership and control provide motivation

When adults are too involved in crafting an experience, that often shuts down on kids’ motivation as they are having a more passive experience.  Often they only need the opportunity to do something to pick up the banner themselves.

At the school where I taught we had an enrichment program where the last period of the day teachers would offer extra classes not directly tied to the curriculum.  I taught lots of different classes for enrichment and was always amazed by what students did or created. 

Over the years of teaching different enrichment subjects, I could share so many stories of kids coming up with projects and running with them, but I will share one lesson that had me shaking my head in wonder.

One class I created I called America, the Beautiful. I taught it many trimesters, and what we did in the class changed depending on my mood and what the kids chose.  One trimester I wanted to focus on America and the written word.  I wrote on the board different categories we might look at—literature and poetry, famous speeches, foundational documents. 

The kids (a mixed group of 4-8th graders) voted on wanting to look at the United States Constitution.  Rather than lecturing on the Constitution, I printed it out and cut it into roughly equal 12 parts for the 12 pairs of kids in the class.  The idea was that the kids would take responsibility for “translating” their section of the Constitution into every day accessible language and would be ready to explain in general terms what their section had to do with. Honestly, I expected the activity to take a day, maybe two.

It took almost two weeks!  Why? Because the kids took the assignment seriously and dove deep.  They were like scholars with a line of the Talmud.  Not only did they look up and ponder the meanings of every word in their section, they sought historic examples of what each section was talking about.  By the time we got to the presentations of each section, the kids were practically bouncing off their chairs waiting for their turns.  They were that proud of themselves and the work they had done.  The more difficult the section, the more delighted they were to be able to put it in context for their peers.  I was astounded.

Remember, this was not their social studies or language arts class.  For enrichment, we basically gave out A’s unless a student really spent the trimester fooling around, so they weren’t working hard for a grade. 

So why were these kids so motivated to work so hard for an intellectual exercise that wasn’t going to check off any boxes for them?  Well, let’s reconsider. First, they got to pick their enrichment class.  They chose to study America.  They could have chosen chess or embroidery or basic coding.  Second, while I decided on the direction of the written word (in previous trimesters I had focused on American culture, on American song and dance, on The American Dream), I gave them a lot of latitude in deciding what they wanted to study.  Finally, beyond the general directions of “take your section and be able to explain it to the class” I didn’t give them any directions about how to go about their work.  I was there as a resource that week, but I wasn’t micromanaging kids. 

When kids get to run with something on their own, they don’t have to be nagged to get it done.  Even when it is hard, they keep going.  And they shine. 

Kids are naturally curious

Let’s go back to the beginning:  Kids come into the world ready to explore, to learn, to seek understanding.  When we allow them the space to do that freely, without making it a chore, a burden, a have to, we don’t need to motivate them.  They do that on their own. 

I challenge you to experiment with focusing more on what is interesting about the work kids are doing—what they like, what is fun, what it means to them—rather than worrying about mastery.  Where kids are motivated to learn, mastery will follow.