There will be times that you as parents will be put in a situation where you are presented with your child’s report card. Hold that reaction there! Don’t react immediately to this, remember, the bad report card is not your child’s worth or the benchmark of your parenting skills. Take a deep breath and let us enlighten you with 7 tips on how you should handle your children’s bad report card.
1- Don’t Scold Them!
Frustrated as you may be when you see all those red colours on the paper, don’t scold your children. Instead, motivate them! Tell your children that they just need to work harder on those failed subjects.
Malaysian are known to be rewarded with food is a bliss for the children (for adults too!), maybe you can bring your child to dinner together to motivate them and let them know that it is completely fine to receive bad results.
However, you believe that your children can do better next time. This way, children will be encouraged to do better and are motivated to learn harder because they feel that their parents are counting on them. So, no scolding, but yes to motivation!
2- Praise, Praise, Praise!
Children are similar to adults when given praises, they are more encouraged to do better than they did before. When you are handling a bad report card, it is important to look for something, for instance, it is important to focus on the child’s efforts and achievements and praise them for that.
This will make the children feel acknowledge and will boost their self-esteem which is good for the children. To do this effectively, prepare a board showing your children’s results in their room, and compare the previous with the recent result.
Even if there is a slight improvement, don’t let that go! Praise your children for that. I bet parents know how hard for your children to achieve that, don’t you? Do you know that praising your child often also shows that you have good parenting skills?
3- Meet the Teacher
Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/emrank/4034143698
This is one way how you can handle the bad report card of your children, meet the teacher. However, this is not to scold, sue or ask the teachers to pass your child, but to ask them what kind of assistance that you can do to help your children for their learning.
What can you do as parents? Discuss with the teachers what are the weaknesses of your child and together, tackle those weaknesses. For instance, your child is weak in Mathematics, find out why, does he hate counting? Maybe it’s time for you to scroll to our blogs and find fun ways to learn Mathematics. Once you know your child’s weakness, you can do so much at home to help them!
If there are Parents-Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, go and attend them parents, don’t skip. This way you can build rapport with the teachers and other parents too! Together, all of you can brainstorm ways to help all the children in the classroom to achieve better results.
4- Talk with the Child
When you receive a bad report card, do not let your feelings be known by your children there and then. Do something else to help your children recover from it, don’t make them more upset by discussing it immediately.
Take them out or go for a walk together. When your children feel better about it, then discuss it together over dinner or a game. Find out why and what happens? Look for ways on how you can offer helping hands to improve your children’s result. Make sure your tone is not high when discussing with them to avoid them feel that you are scolding them. Remember, no to scolding, yes to motivation!
5- Stay… Calm
Able to stay calm in a chaotic environment or situation is proof of your good parenting skills. And that skills are needed when you are handling your children’s bad report card. You need to respond calmly to this because the children will unconsciously absorb this energy from you and will enable them to calm down too!
Drop everything that you are doing and empathize with your children. Ask them first is there anything that you can do for them to feel better or do they want to talk about it? If yes, listen well to them because we adults know very well that we just want people to listen to us when we are upset, the same goes for our precious little ones.
6- Set Accomplishment Goals
To do this, you need to sit with your children together to set the goals. Remember, try to break down the goals that you have. For instance, if you are setting a goal to get “A” at the end of the year from March, try to break down the goal from C, B and to A grade finally. This way, you will be able to prevent your children to be discouraged if they cannot achieve A for the next test.
To make this effective, you and your children need to write it down. Make a big board and decorate it. One thing about this, do not display the board on where your guests or their cousins can see, display it in your private room or your children’s room, if they agree to do so.
7- Celebrate…
When we are thinking about our children’s achievements, often we see big achievements such as getting good grades in examinations, chosen to be in a school play or winning sports competitions but rarely parents see small successes in schools or at home as achievements.
Those small successes should be acknowledged by the parents to boost children’s self-esteem and this will encourage them to share more on what they did and completed to parents. Well, that is all you want as parents, isn’t it? Children are open to share everything and this will be their habits because they know you acknowledge their achievements, great or small.
