With us already halfway through Term 1 and exams only weeks away, the sight of your child glued to a screen for hours, with all the schoolwork ignored, is enough to drive you up the wall.
If you’re a proactive parent who can’t stand doing nothing, you hunt for ways to cut down your child’s screen time. You might have headed over to Google or even asked other parents for their hacks. You try this, you try that.
And yes, sometimes the nagging and ‘screen bans’ reduce the technological distractions a little bit — until it doesn’t.
Just ask families where social media or screen addiction has turned into a sensitive topic over dinner and a constant uphill battle. You’ll hear the same thing every time: ‘We’ve tried it all. It just doesn’t work.’
In over sixteen years of working and mentoring high school students, we’ve seen this pattern time and time again. When screens start to feel like a prosthetic extension of their arm and simply cutting off distractions just isn’t working, here’s the underlying issue many parents overlook.
Disinterest is a Symptom of a Lack of Direction
The thing is, it’s not just teens’ attachment to an excessive amount of screen time. If you’re one to keep a close eye on your child, you’ve probably seen other signs.
Each teenager is different from another, but here are some of the common scenarios. You notice evasive behaviours like pushing schoolwork and focused study time for later (which usually ends up in cram sessions) or sporadic effort. They only do things when they ‘feel like it.’
Even adults can be guilty of disinterest. When there’s an absence of purpose and direction, when you don’t understand what you’re doing, let alone appreciate the incentive for putting in the effort, you wouldn’t spill blood and sweat to face a task.
And forget going all in. Half the time, you might even hesitate to take the first step. So if grown-ups have the tendency to fall into that trap, how would a teenager with uncertainties about school react in a similar circumstance?
Many parents tell us, ‘They’re too young to figure it out anyway.’ To some extent, that’s true. But if your child doesn’t have any sense of direction to start with, it’s inevitable for them to just go through the motions. They’ll be putting in effort for the sake of it and often out of pressure or fear of disappointing you or their teachers.
While that might look good enough for now, eventually these students will run out of gas. Once they hit their burn-out threshold, their wellbeing will slowly decline, their confidence will collapse and their academic performance will blow up.
Strategies to Build Purpose and Motivation in Your Child
So what does a student with direction look like?
Simply put, they can clearly recall:
- The WHAT: the goal they’ve set for themselves.
- The HOW: the steps they must take for them to achieve it.
They also understand that to reach their goals, they must first put in the hours and effort. In turn, they manage their time and tasks proactively to achieve the results they want.
When such a high sense of alignment is present, when they can make sense of how schoolwork and all the daily tasks connect with achieving their goals, that makes very little room for doubt. Imagine far less second-guessing in how they’ll approach assessments and fewer mental tug-of-wars on whether they can recall what they studied during exams for your child.
And that’s exactly how the most high-performing students are able to confidently and proactively smash those exams out of the park and improve their results consistently.
To help clarify your child’s goals and determine the practical steps to get there, Kalibrate-Ed uses three strategies that have helped struggling students become motivated, confident and achieve 90+ in marks across subjects.
1. Future navigator
About ten years ago, we realised that we wanted to give students a way to reach their goals and navigate their future, not only to help them articulate what they wanted but also to pick the steps to get there for themselves.
That second part is powerful and very important because it’s proven to be the piece that makes the single biggest difference in students: ownership.
When someone consciously commits to a chosen direction, they’ll move forward on their own and with confidence. That means there’s no need to constantly breathe down their necks or nag them endlessly to study for upcoming Term 1 exams.
In fact, many parents tell us they’re pleasantly surprised to hear updates or even questions from their child without any prompting on their end, which is a clear sign they’re genuinely engaged with the material and motivated to do well.
And speaking of motivation…
2. Motivation catalyst
Motivation is the engine that’s going to help your child accelerate their performance and power through when things get rough. But despite what most people think, it isn’t a light switch you can just turn on or a feeling that you wait for. It’s a lifelong skill that students should learn to cultivate as they walk their chosen paths even after high school.
At Kalibrate-Ed, it’s important for us to teach teenagers how to build motivation, and that involves asking questions like:
- When their engine sputters and they feel like they can’t take the next step or can’t do what they need to do, how can we add ‘more power’ and get them running?
- What ‘fuel’ works best to motivate them?
- When there’s excess fuel, how can we store it, so they have enough ‘gas’ for tougher times ahead?
When they master the skill of building motivation, your child can push through with full effort even when pressure rises. This is especially true for students we’ve mentored who once struggled with uncontrollable jitters leading up to exams but have since learned how to steady themselves and perform well under intense pressure.
3. Strategy implementation
Once the first two pieces are in place, the third element — execution — determines how everything comes together to produce the results your child is capable of achieving.
A big part of this is making sure your child stays on track, well supported and far from drifting off their course, with early interventions in place at the faintest signs of slipping.
We find that this approach reduces many of the usual bumps along the way, while at the same time strengthening the resilience your child will need for their academic journey and life beyond school.
Is Your Child Motivated and Ready for Term 1 Exams?
If yes, that’s great and a job well done! If not, and that’s totally okay, there’s still time.
To help turn things around, we’re hosting a live, interactive session for Year 7 to 12 parents who want to improve their child’s marks, even when exam prep has been pushed to the last minute.
Whether your child is underperforming, doing ‘fine’ or aiming to push for higher marks, we’ll share the specific strategies Kalibrate-Ed’s students used to achieve a 99+ ATAR and lift their exam results across subjects. Get a FREE Ticket to ‘Exam Tactics for Higher Marks’ event and get exclusive in-session resources. See you there!
