We see a lot of demotivated students at our centre getting 70s and 80s. They are “coasting” and not meeting their full potential. Families often think that working with us will help their child realize that full potential. They know their child has the capacity to put in more effort — they see it happen with sports, games and hobbies. Perhaps a tutor will help them apply that same drive to their schoolwork.

Tutoring, in a basic sense, will help a student understand the course material, and in turn improve their grades. Yet often, the child remains demotivated outside of our lessons. They continue to coast and do the minimum, achieving acceptable grades, but not excellent ones. Here is to how to change that.

Understand the Student’s Reasons for Coasting

What many parents actually want is for us to instil an intrinsic motivation in their child. They want their child to see the importance of their education, and to react accordingly. This is a difficult task.

Demotivated students are generally dispassionate about their education because homework unrewarding and uninteresting. What is rewarding is getting their parents off their backs — other than that, there’s a bit of a dopamine rush when seeing a good score. So, if someone is dispassionate about their education, then fully applying themselves is very high-labour and low-reward.

For students getting 70s and 80s, the reality is that grade is acceptable. They are putting in minimal effort, and completed the task appropriately. This is a logical approach to something they do not see much value in — get the task done, and then spend the rest of their time on things they actually enjoy.

To reframe that mindset, we will have to convince students of more reasons to do well. This is easier to do this for older students, because college applications are approaching, and the fate of their future is more directly at stake. For younger students, it’s unclear to a lot of them why they should feign passion.

One answer is because drive is a practiced skill that you can’t cram for / magically conjure up when it starts to matter. When graduation approaches in a few years, a demotivated student will realize that their executive functioning skills are underdeveloped. Executive functioning skills including planning, organizing, task initiation, troubleshooting, and self-monitoring. This realization will be a shock, because the student has always gotten decent grades. It is a fault of the system that so many students are easily able to rip acceptable marks without developing these skills.

When things get hard, it often happens fast and unexpectedly for the student; if they have limited experience with putting in effort, the work will quickly overwhelm them, and they may experience failure. As adults, we know this to be true, but for younger students, their experience so far has said otherwise: minimal effort, acceptable grades. We can convince them “things will get harder soon” as much we want — the fact is, they haven’t gotten harder, so the student is reacting accordingly. Can we blame them for trusting their experience over our warnings? Yes, we can blame them, but we can also have empathy for why they don’t believe us.

Let Them Fail

In an ideal world, things will slowly get more challenging for your child. This slow acceleration will allow them time to adjust to the new workload, and experiment with putting in more effort. Realistically, though, things get hard fast, and students experience sudden failure.

Concerned parents try to warn their child about this impending crash, but it’s often met with an eye roll.

Consider this: has your child ever truly failed before? Failing a quiz here and there is normal — but have they ever truly bombed a course? Or have you ultimately come to their rescue every, single, time? If so, this has trained them to believe they cannot fail; you have never let them. They will continue to capitalize on your support for as many years as they can, until one day, the work will get too hard for both of you. And finally, finally, they will fail. This often happens towards the end of high school, or early CEGEP — a time when failure is unforgiving, and their future is directly on the line.

The trick for younger students is to let them fail now, when it matters less. Rip out the safety net of your constant rescue, and let them feel what it’s like to fail. Allow them to process the natural motivators of shame and frustration. Get ready for them to come to you for help, rather than having to chase them. Experience with failure will flip the roles and put the desire for success into the student directly (rather than that desire coming from only you).

Of course, we don’t want students to feel this way, so we push and support them to work harder: we gain them assisted success. But co-working with a student in too many aspects of their education actually dooms them to educational dependency. And as mentioned, this will result in sudden failure when the work becomes too difficult and their future is more immediately on the line. Failure is inevitable; do not coddle them so much that they grow into young adulthood without any experience on how to deal with it.

For many parents, the idea of their child failing is extremely distressing. This might be due to something called “enmeshment”. Enmeshment is when a parent’s self-worth is deeply connected to the accomplishments or their child. When the student experiences success, the parent feels it with them. But when they experience failure, the parent feels that they themselves have failed. It is important to remember that your job, as a parent, is to set up your child for success through love, guidance and support. Your job is not to do their work for them, or reprimand them so much that their only motivator to do homework is fear of punishment. As mentioned, this will set them up to fail the moment the work gets too hard for both of you. So when I say “let them fail”, I do not mean that you should stop supporting them. Continue to make yourself available for help, but avoid doing the bulk of the work with them, as if it’s your homework. In order to develop an intrinsic motivation to do well, their educational successes must be their own.

Ultimately we can convince a student that failure is approaching all we want, but for stubborn ones, they need to see it to believe it. Failure is a natural consequence that heals, teaches, and pushes students in ways their parents often cannot. If it’s early enough, allow them experience it and develop appropriate reactions before too much is at stake.

Reward Systems

Demotivated students achieving acceptable grades do not have many immediate reasons to put in more work. Of course, we know their future is ahead of them, but what is rewarding to them now?

Students who are intrinsically motivated get joy from seeing good grades. Demotivated students do not get that same joy. When a demotivated student at my centre gets a great grade, I ask if they are proud of themselves. This question is often met with a shrug. “I did it for my parents,” they say.

If a student’s main motivator for doing well is getting their parents off their backs, this will create resentment. Demotivated students want, more than anything, the freedom to do what they enjoy doing. How can we capitalize on this?

One way is to employ an external reward system for doing well. This approach is a double-edged sword — the hope is that one day, they will see their future as enough of a reward system, but for now, the concept is distant and blurry. By adding at-home rewards for doing well, we are patching up a flaw in the system (the flaw being that the importance of one’s future is poorly advertised as a reward, so students see no reason to do well).

Rewards can be given for grades over a certain number (for students gets 70s/80s, this can be for grades over 90). I do not suggest making a reward something like “free time to play video games”. Leveraging a student’s free time in this way will create resentment; I would strongly advise against it. Instead, make rewards more concrete: a new gaming system, literal money, special clothes, etc. This works on the most stubborn of students.

If the student is only somewhat stubborn, a better reward is something that they enjoy which happens to be educational, or a route towards their future. For example, if a student loves drums, send them to a week of drum camp if they achieve a certain grade. If a student loves video games, find shadowing opportunities for game testers, or send them to coding camp. If they like a game with educational potential, like Minecraft, there are Minecraft tutors for hire who can help them improve their building skills in-game. These types of rewards will motivate the student to do well and provide them with experiences that, over time, will showcase possibilities for their future. This will help create an intrinsic desire to apply themselves at school.

Stop Being Their Personal Organizer

Demotivated students often have a tutor or parent who supports them regularly with organizing their schoolwork. This support helps students achieve and manage better grades, but it prevents the student from developing executive functioning skills. A “complete homework manager” removes the need for the student to learn appropriate task-initiation, organization, and self-monitoring.

If a student struggles in those areas, it makes sense to receive assistance in them. But what doesn’t make sense is to fully take on the responsibility of those skills — they will never learn to organize themselves if you keep doing it for them.

When helping a student organize themselves, there is a fine line between showing how to manage their workload, and doing it for them. I often have to remind myself that doing things like explaining instructions, messaging the teacher for clarification, building homework schedules for someone, or directing a student back to their old notes for review is actually the skill they often lack the most. It is instinctive to answer logistical or instructional questions immediately because they don’t actually relate to the course material, but again, this is the part students struggle with (to put it simply, getting themselves started and set up). I try to reflect, over and over, as a tutor: “is this a logistical question the student should know how to solve without me here?”. If the answer is yes, I will put my hands behind my back, and guide the student towards success with my words. Having them solve the problem makes them the driver, and allows them to actually develop executive functioning skills. When I work with demotivated students, teaching educational independence often looks like:

  • ensuring the student, on their own, can understand what’s due and when
  • having the student be able to read and understand instructions for assignments
  • learning to independently create a time-management schedule for homework
  • for students who prefer digital solutions, teaching them to manage and code a better agenda
  • often students are unclear about instructions on an assignment (for example, it might not be clear how many words an essay has to be), so I will guide them through the process of writing an email to their teacher asking for clarification
  • guiding them to their old notes and having them take their best attempt at reviewing previous concepts independently before asking for assistance
  • helping them navigate the internet to solve a problem through external sources (a tough one, but a necessary one especially as they get older)

For all of these skills, it’s important to have them be the one to solve the problem. Encourage questions, and allow your child to run into issues. Teach them how to troubleshoot. Since most of these organizational issues involve using a computer or looking inside Google Classroom, I make the sure the student is the one controlling the computer (not me). When they are outside of their sessions and come across similar issues, they will have literal muscle memory on how to solve them.

So, even if a student is demotivated outside of our lessons, the development of this skillset will support the student when they eventually do fail / when the work catches up to them.

Teaching executive functioning is easier said than done. If you’d like me to do this for you, or guide you more on how to do this as a parent, you can request a session here.

Use Peer Pressure

Demotivated students often have friends who take a similar approach to school. It is natural to mimic what others are doing; if a child’s social circle is putting in minimal effort, then that becomes the acceptable norm.

If possible, encourage and facilitate your child’s relationships with students who are intrinsically motivated. This is a tough one, but it should work wonders.

Do not mistake this advice as encouragement to rip them away from their current friends. That will create resentment and resistance. Here are some ways to do this well:

  • coordinate with the parents of motivated students to form a study group
  • encourage and facilitate regular play dates with certain students
  • a great one is have the student join a social club like debate or student leadership; this will put them in a natural space to build relationships with students who want to succeed
    • ensure that the new activity you register them for contains motivated students — you would not be doing much if you signed them up to something with their cohort of friends

Final Words

All of these solutions focus on putting the autonomy and ownership of a child’s education in their hands, not yours. When a student feels ownership over their education, they often become more intrinsically motivated. This process is rocky, and can sometimes involve failure. It can also involve frustration and disappointment from the parent — it is important to remember that their successful and failures are not a reflection of your worth as a parent. Ultimately, a student’s future is theirs to drive forward; if they crash the car, do not grab the wheel. Teach them how to get out of the rubble, and direct them back onto the road.