Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning!!

 

My best advice is to focus on fostering the following three key skills that can help our kids complete their work faster, concentrate longer, and remember more of what they are learning

1. Focus

With distance learning, focus is now a prized superskill. Without it, kids struggle to learn. To minimize the interruptions and distractions that kill focus, we can do the following.

Designate a learning playing field. Kids need a place where they can concentrate, and when we designate a place that is for concentration only, we help them train their brains to focus better.

For example, they might have a specific spot at a small desk in a hallway where they do their online schooling and their homework—and only those things. Have them leave their desk to check social media or do anything but focused work. Encourage them to step away from their desk when they take breaks. Bonus: Their presence at that desk can be a signal to others in the household that they are trying to focus, and that everyone else needs to be quiet and careful not to interrupt.

2. Motivation

Trying to motivate kids with sticks and carrots is its own special form of parental hell. Without self-motivation, it’s pretty darn hard to learn. Fortunately, we can foster self-motivation in our k

ids by supporting their competence, their independence, and their connection to others. These are the three core psychological needs that, when filled, lead to self-motivation. Here’s how to help meet those needs.

Allow independence. Our kids need the freedom to fail on their own—and the freedom to succeed without having to give you credit. Our kids can’t feel responsible for their schoolwork if we are still the organizing force.

Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis

3.Flexibility

You might have noticed: Every plan we make seems to fall apart. We are living through a time of accelerated change and constant unknowns. That makes it critical for us—and our kids—to remain flexible. They may be going back into the classroom this year. They may not. Either way, they’ll need to roll with the punches. We can help them do so.

Stick to a consistent sleep schedule. Exhaustion makes us brittle; it’s pretty hard to stay limber when we’re so tired we just want to lay down and cry.

Despite not having much going on, many kids are exhausted (especially teenagers). Not having the structure of school (at least the don’t-miss-your-bus kind) makes it harder to impose our own schedules and enforce bedtimes. In addition, many older kids who are used to having a lot of privacy and social time at school are now filling their needs for independence and connection with their peers by staying up playing video games half the night, unmonitored by sleeping parents.

Unfortunately, irregular sleep causes more than grogginess and grouchiness. Even modest reductions in sleep quality, such as simply not sleeping deeply because of a blue-light-induced decrease in melatonin, tend to make kids feel lonelier, even without a reduction in quantity. So, if their sense of connection to peers is already fragile, sleep disruption might be exacerbating the problem.

We parents will do well to enforce consistent bedtimes. The most important thing is not necessarily that they go to bed early (if their school starts late and they can sleep in), but rather that they are getting enough sleep for their age, and that they are doing so on a regular schedule. (See this post for how to reset kids’ biological clocks.)