Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

Parents need to pay close attention to the study habits of their children, so as to quickly detect and correct any wayward tendencies. Many times getting teenagers to do the right thing can be difficult. Children in this age group can be particularly headstrong and opinionated.

Resorting to physical punishment to effect a change in their behaviour can however produce negative reactions in the children. A better way exists, to correct the child’s errant behaviour without turning him against you.

In this post, I share the true story about how I discovered my son’s bad handwriting habit, and eventually helped him remedy it, without employing painful physical punishment.

Discovering the Problem

Looking back now, it’s obvious to me that if I had been paying as much attention as I’d originally planned, I would have noticed it. But I got carried away with showing him and his siblings the exciting world outside school, in my bid to give them a balanced education.

Then one morning, as he was preparing for school, one of his notebooks fell open. I saw the careless scribble of mostly unrecognizable letters of the alphabet, and was horrified. The look on his face was however one of indifference. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You’re actually asking me that, when your handwriting looks like that?” I replied, pointing at his open notebook. “We’ll talk about this when you get back.” I ended.

That night I went through the notes he had been taking in class and discovered the same problem of very poor handwriting in all of them.

It was so bad that I could not recognise most of the words he had written. He was doing many things wrong. For instance, he painted over most letters in the words he wrote, making a mess on almost every page with ink. He also wrote with total disregard for sentence case. Capital letters popped up in the middle of words in a particular sentence at random.

When I asked him to read what he had written, he barely managed to get through one sentence. In other words even he, the writer, had difficulty reading what he had written. I could not believe he had let his handwriting deteriorate that badly!

My First Attempt at Correcting the Problem…Fails!

As I thought about it, I realized there was a big problem. If he could not read what he had written, there was no way his teacher would be able to do so, talk less of scoring him accurately. In other words, he would be doomed to failure if he took an exam.

I needed no one to tell me what to do. It was obvious that I had to intervene. This was the role a parent was required to play, to correct any child’s deviation from the desired path.

And so I told my 13 year old teenage son that I wanted him to start paying attention to his handwriting while copying the teacher’s notes on the board. Telling him anecdotes about people who lost marks for writing illegibly, I tried to impress upon him the need to take more care in writing, so he would be able to read his notes conveniently after classes.

He nodded in understanding (or so I thought), and I congratulated myself for having been so effective in getting him to realize what he needed to do

What I forgot was that with children, especially teenagers, very often what you tell them goes in one ear and comes out the other, without making a lasting impression on them.

They have a very short attention span – especially for things they find boring e.g. parental “lectures” And that’s why – as my mother (a 30 year veteran Montessori trained teacher) always reminds me – you have to repeat everything to them, and check for compliance regularly, UNTIL they get used to doing it without supervision.

I’m getting better at doing the repeating and reminding thing now. But back when this handwriting incident occurred, I was still learning. So, a few days later when I checked my son’s notebooks, I found that nothing had changed. He was still writing terribly!

I Remember My Handball Coach’s Corrective Strategy

At this point I considered resorting to physical punishment to get him to sit up e.g. spanking. But then I remembered that I’d decided to reduce the use of physical punishment to instruct my kids i.e. to prevent them associating learning with pain.

Then I recalled a method used by our state handball coach – back in Kwara state – during training sessions. He would split us into two teams and get us to compete against ourselves. Any player who made an avoidable error would automatically cause his entire team to repeat the move being practiced. And this would continue until each team got it right without making a single error.

The above coaching strategy proved quite effective in getting even the most playful or unruly team members to sit up. No one wanted to get blamed (and temporarily hated) for making the others do more hard training than necessary. The result was that we became a well oiled team capable of executing most of our moves with little or no errors.

Adapting My Coach’s Strategy Produces Results!

To help my son, I realized I needed an adaptation of the coach’s strategy to get him to take writing properly more seriously. So, I called him for another chat, and told him to re-write all his notes from scratch, but this time taking pains to write legibly, and avoiding any errors.

He immediately got moody and groaned outwardly saying “But I can read what I’ve written”. I replied “If you can – which I doubt – I cannot, and neither, I’m sure, can your teacher. How do you expect to get good marks if your teacher cannot read your writing?” He left for his room grumbling about how we never let him rest etc.

As the week progressed, I would periodically ask to see his re-copied notes. Whenever I discovered even ONE painted letter, or wrong use of capitalization, I simply asked him to go back to the beginning and start writing it all over again. The first time I told him to do it, he thought it was a joke…until I hissed at him saying “Get going…I’m serious.”

By the end of that week he had become quite sober, and showed a lot of eagerness to do it right. But old habits die hard. Every now and then he still brought me notes with the outlawed errors in them, and I promptly rewarded him with “Go and write it all again!”

And we kept doing it over and over, and over. His siblings poked friendly fun at him, which he did not find funny. After a while, especially when he saw I would not relent he became sober, and more focussed. Gradually, over time, he changed.

Today, his handwriting is so much better, compared to what it used to be. But there’s still room to improve. It’s ironic to also note that he now brags about how well he can write, to his siblings! I look back and I realise that if I had failed to take timely corrective action the way I did, the boy may not have recovered from the problem. And his performance in virtually every subject would have suffered even worse outcomes in the future.

Final Words

Judging from the experience I’ve gained from coaching my four kids (ages 13 to 7) on different aspects of their class work, I believe the method described above can be quite useful in getting them to show seriousness.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ideas for getting your kid(s) to drop an unhealthy habit, I urge you to try using the strategy described in this post. It might just be the solution you need!