This has been an ongoing problem since second grade. He doesn’t listen, rushes through assignments, doesn’t bring anything home, misbehaves, and lies to get himself out of trouble. He was/is very smart! But since he has been slacking in school so much he is starting to fall behind. He started off with straight A’s now he’s getting B’s C’s and D’s no A’s. We have tried taking away privileges, grounding him, making him do extra work, basically anything we can think of to put an end to this. This year we got him a daily planner to write all of his assignments in and his teacher signs off on it, and also writes how his day was (if he was good or bad). He’s been in school two weeks and has only had two good days. He was also erasing his homework assignments on the bus, now he has to write it in pen. I’ve talked to his dad (I’m step mom) about taking him to his doctor in case he has ADHD or something but he believes he’s just a stubborn child and will grow out of it. I don’t know what else to do to get him to take school more seriously.
Does he understand why he’s in school, and why he needs to learn these topics?
I was a lot like your son at his age. I thought school was boring and pointless and I strongly suspected it was just a way for adults to warehouse kids so that we didn’t start roaming the streets in packs. If you’d offered me a job – any job! – instead of forcing me to sit behind a desk all day, I’d have been thrilled. I even used to envy the kids in my history books that worked in mines or as chimney sweeps. 😀 At least their lives were interesting!
Perhaps it might help if you discussed with your son the purpose behind the classes he’s taking. Ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, and lay out all the things he’s going to have to learn and do to get there.
And, maybe you could try one thing that worked pretty well for me… pay him. Instead of an allowance, my mom gave me 1 dollar for every graded assignment/project over 80, 2 dollars over 90 and a whole 5 dollars for anything I got 100 percent on. All of a sudden I LOVED those weekly spelling quizzes! Dead simple to study for, and a guaranteed five bucks in my pocket.
Kids are often very bad at long term planning. I was genuinely surprised to see all A’s and B’s on my next report, after my mom started her incentive program.
I can’t say whether something like that would work with your boy, of course! Every kid is different.
Good luck! (He’s far from being the first kid to be completely unmotivated by school.)
There could be a lot of reasons to why some kids don’t care about school. These are the reasons that I commonly hear about:
They suffer from drug problems
They have family problems
Hanging out with a group of kids who do not care about school and wanting to be part of them
Depression
They are highly gifted and don’t find enough stimulation in the school work.
They have a lot of difficulties learning the material
They don’t see the point in the work that they are doing and might feel like they are just wasting their time with school because of this
They are being bullied
and the list goes on.
Some kids do not care for school. There are an endless amount of possible reasons for this. Some are withdrawn due to personal struggles and it is portrayed as if they do not care. Some kids are hopeless about their future, and what is the point of going to school if you believe you have no future. Some kids are brought into drugs and other self destructive behaviors. This is a very touchy subject for a lot of people, and rightly so. We should not punish and look down upon those who have these behaviors. Actions are driven by very deep emotions, deep pains. When people behave this way it also is portrayed as if they don’t care about school. Before you focus on academia, we must focus on the raw human being.
This sounds like classic ADD to me. My son, now 14, had similar experiences. They can get good grades, and man do we end up punishing them for it when they can’t.
“I don’t care” is a lot easier for a kid to say than to admit “I can’t do it and I don’t understand why. I must be an idiot.”
If you just keep telling the kid that he just has to get organized, use his planner, not forget things, but his brain literally will not do those things, how it that helpful?
Please get him tested. If a kid genuinely has ADHD medications can do wonders. My son describes it as the ‘noise’ being turned off and things going at the right speed.