Parenting: Helping Children Deal with Academic Issues - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Helping Children Deal with Academic Issues Well, you'll probably know a little bit just by watching your child struggle with homework and getting feedback from the school what areas your child is struggling in. It might be math, it might be handwriting - a lot of kids have issues with handwriting, it might be reading - that they're just not keeping up. So the best thing that you can possibly do is talk to the teacher about ways that he or she suggests that you can support your child. One of the things not to do is to get super involved in your child's homework situation and... because they're lagging behind a little bit or they're struggling. Sometimes parents respond by paying attention to every single detail of the child's homework. That usually doesn't work — it usually backfires. And so what you really want to do is keep that learning process in the hands of the school and the child with support whenever he or she asks you for help with homework, then you want to offer it. But don't be there, sitting down with your child saying, Let's get this math done now, together. Don't do that, because it takes away the self-efficacy from your child, and also causes a lot of pressure and a lot of discouragement. If things continue to not go well, you can request that the child have an evaluation at the school for a learning disability. Sometimes that's the reason that kids are struggling with a particular subject matter is because they have a learning disability in that area. The school psychologist will get involved in testing, often times, and the special ed teacher will do some academic testing, and then you can find out if there really is something going on in the child's brain where the ability, and the ability to produce what you can know don't match. So that's where you see a learning disability. You might also want to consider some tutoring for your child, and if that doesn't work, then special education programming can be put into place at school for particular...math, reading, spelling, handwriting, language... kinds of issues that the children are having.
