Tips To Resolve Anxiety About Education

It’s so important to make sure your child is confident in their learning abilities – success doesn’t come easily, but it won’t come at all if your child doesn’t believe in what they can do! Check out these three tips on how to promote academic self-confidence in your child.

Setting realistic goals 

Smashing academic goals is an obvious route to confidence in learning abilities, but it’s important to make sure those goals are realistic and achievable. It’s easy to rely on others around you to work out academic goals for your child, but every child is different – they learn differently, and at different paces, so goals really do need to reflect this. 

 

In schools, goals are often set by age – but this has led to problems, with summer-born kids more than 30% more likely to experience mental health issues due to the stress of being part of an academic year group that is significantly older than them. These kids are only a few months younger than the eldest in their year, but their rate of academic development can be significantly slower. 

 

Gauge goals that are challenging but achievable for your child – and support them in getting there. Take the time to test their abilities and work out their learning patterns to create goals that will actually benefit them.

 

 

Praise 

It’s so important to make sure you’re praising your children throughout the learning process. Of course, they need to learn how to take criticism of their work, and how to accept and learn from their failures – but praise should always be given where it’s due. Their learning skills really need to be celebrated. 

 

Even if your child has arrived at the wrong answer, tell them they’ve done a good job by trying so hard to work out the correct one. Celebrate their thinking, creativity, and logic – and their confidence in their own learning is sure to be boosted.

 

Extra support 

It can be very discouraging if a child really puts the effort in, and successfully builds up some strong academic skills in term time, only to forget half of what they learned over the holidays! Getting back into the swing of things after a break can be hard enough, but if your child also discovers they’re not as sharp as they were in certain areas that can be a real knock to their confidence. 

 

It’s very important to keep brushing up on those skills over the holidays – just two to three hours of active learning in a week is enough to prevent learning loss from occurring over time off. If you don’t, it’s estimated your child can spend up to six weeks of the Autumn term re-learning old material – a little work over the holidays can save a lot of time!

 

A great way to combat this is with practice at home, or by bringing in a tutor if you’re too busy yourself at the time. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either: it’s estimated that just a couple of hours of tutoring a week during the holidays could prevent a massive 11 weeks of maths learning loss!