Supporting Your Child’s Learning

Despite your best efforts as a parent, sometimes it can be tough to figure out how to best support your child’s learning. Even when it feels like you’re working really hard, you may not see the results you’re looking for in your child. This can lead to worry, frustration, and family conflict. That’s why we want to shed light onto the emotional and relational aspects of learning that are not widely understood. Parents who understand the emotional and relational sides of learning often work less hard and see better achievement in their kids.

Emotions and learning are closely related. To keep things simple, today we are going to take a look at 3 ways to support your child’s learning that seem to have nothing to do with academics.

Create Strong Relationships that are Affirming of Emotions

There is growing research demonstrating that emotional intelligence is a better indicator of success in life, than intelligence measured along the IQ scale. This highlights just how integral it is to raise our children to be more self-aware, and able to regulate. It also means that focusing solely on academic achievements can undermine your child’s long term success. 

To better understand the significance of emotions in learning, it can be helpful to think of your child’s brain as a house. The foundation of the house is built on relationship and emotional support. The main floor of the house is where learning happens, and the top floor of the house is where achievement happens. 

So you can imagine that it’s really hard to learn and achieve when you have a shaky foundation. It’s natural for many parents to want to push aside or shut down emotions during study or learning time, feeling that they get in the way of completing the learning task at hand. As much as it may seem counterintuitive, actually making space for those emotions, validating those emotions and comforting and encouraging your child, will support better academic performance. 

Parents are often the closest adults to their child and can be referred to as the primary attachment figures. Teachers are what we call Secondary Attachment Figures. When children are struggling at school, it’s important to consider their relationship with their teacher, and what emotions are at the forefront when they are in the classroom. Children are biologically programmed to seek and maintain meaningful connections - it’s how they survive. When healthy connections are not established, and emotional needs are not met, children become subconsciously preoccupied with meeting these needs and their brain is not freed up for learning. This can be true both at home and at school. Ensuring that emotional and relational needs are met gives kids a much better chance at success in school.

Get to Know Your Child’s Individual Learning Needs

Through exploring, observing, and acknowledging your child’s learning style, you can strengthen and enhance your relationship with your child (imagine what it’s like for your child to feel understood, like you “get” them). It will also allow you to provide learning opportunities that are more accessible for them.  

It is essential to recognize that all children learn differently. Knowing whether your child learns better by hearing, seeing, or doing, can help you offer the right approach to learning and avoid a lot of frustration both for your child and for you! 

It is also important to advocate for your child at school if they are struggling. We work with a lot of parents around advocacy at school because it can be very intimidating and tricky to navigate. We encourage parents to foster a positive relationship with the teacher, provide positive feedback and express concerns in a non-judgmental manner, while sharing what works well at home.

Cultivate Confidence

Cultivating confidence can help your child learn how to learn. Normalizing mistakes, inviting risk taking in learning, and ensuring that your child has the time and space to explore their interests and play, are all very important to building the foundation for learning.

Many well-meaning parents enrol their children in an array of activities to benefit their development and explore their interests, and there are certainly benefits to structured activities. The challenge is in finding a balance between structured and unstructured time, because the unstructured time is what allows children the freedom to develop executive function skills, and engage in exploratory play, follow their curiosity, and foster a love of learning.

Research has linked overscheduling to lagging executive function skills in children. This is because when a child is overscheduled, there is little opportunity for children to exercise agency in planning or to have enough space for free play, which is critical to child development. Ensuring your child has the time and space for personal downtime is vital.

With so much pressure on the average family (and child), it’s no wonder that so many are struggling. If your child is struggling academically, we sincerely hope that you will consider going back to the foundation, to address their emotional, relational and individual learning needs, which ultimately lay the foundation for their success both academically, and in their future. This is how you play the long game in supporting your child’s learning. You might be surprised at how well it works.