It’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it; how you can really help your child succeed

Picture the scene. A family sits around a table playing Scrabble or Monopoly or any good board game. Lots of good learning is going on.

Everyone is focused on a goal – making high-scoring words or getting richer. Children are having to wait for their turn and manage their disappointment if someone else places a word where they were wanting to go or buys the last hotel. Players may have to deal with the kind of run of bad luck which can afflict anyone; too many impossible letters, never being able to buy a property and always having to pay rent to others.

In Monopoly you can even go broke and be out of the game while the rest of the family plays on! And in the margins of the game there are great conversations happening. Mum muses about next year’s holiday. Dad shares memories of playing games with his parents. Children chatter about things that have happened at school during the week.

There’s no doubt that playing games with you children is a great thing for parents to do. It helps them develop on many fronts. But look a little more carefully and you may notice that in different families playing a board game is done in very different ways.

In one kind of home dad is so competitive that the game is shrouded in a cloud of adrenalin. In another no-one pays any attention to the rules in an attempt to make sure that no one loses. In a third, although, the game is being played, it is clear that mum is only taking part under sufferance as she is grumpy and constantly mentioning all the other things she could be doing.

In our fourth vignette, although one family member has a terrible crop of letters, the parents are constantly encouraging her to keep going and keep looking. She tries changing her letters and suddenly her luck changes as she scores a surprise seven letter word.

And in a final imaginary scene, although the parents are playing the game, they are in fact also reading a newspaper, checking e-mails on their BlackBerry and popping in and out of the room to run errands.

As the title of this piece suggests, in parenting, it’s not what you do it’s the way that you do it!

While organising lots of stimulating family activities is a good start for a parent, it is only that. A start. For the way you do parenting also matters. As I explained in a series of workshops for GEMS parents recently in Dubai, it is worth pausing to think about how the way you are impacts on your children’s development.

Think back to the game example above. What does a child learn about life if the rules are always broken? Or if you are apparently too busy to be really involved? Or about commitment and concentration if you demonstrate little skill in this area? Or, most positively, if the life lesson is about perseverance and resilience?

The benefits of supporting your child’s learning at home

First things first. The evidence on the value of parents engaging in their children’s learning is now overwhelming. Studies all over the world have shown this. Professor John Hattie puts it like this: “Parents can have major effects in terms of the encouragement and expectations that they transmit to their children.” And Professor Charles Desforges is even more precise: “Parental involvement [is] a much bigger factor than school effects in shaping attainment.” Parental involvement improves examination results, produces more socially adept young people and, perhaps most importantly of all, directly influences the kinds of learners that children become.

Parents help their children most by:

• Setting high aspirations in all aspects of learning from the achievement of results to the input of effort when things are difficult.
• Creating a home environment full of learning opportunities, especially as a place where regular and meaningful conversations can take place.
• Supporting their children in all that they do, especially through the establishment of helpful routines – regular practice, a love of reading, an interest in world affairs, visits to interesting places and so on.

Powerful parents are more like learning coaches than teachers, an idea to which I will return. But in line with my theme there is one more critical piece to the parenting jigsaw to understand.

For aspirational parental attitudes effectively to be passed on there needs to be a consistency between what parents say and what they do.

So, a dad who talks to his son about the value of reading books but never does so himself will be sending mixed messages. Or a mum who talks to her children about the values of kindness and scolds then whenever they raise their voices in anger but who herself is constantly gossiping negatively about her child’s teacher or shouting at her husband is unlikely to achieve her goals.

These are, perhaps, extreme examples to make a point. More often it will be in more subtle gaps between belief and action that parents can unwittingly undo the great work they are doing in other areas of their parenting lives.

The development of character

While the potentially positive influence of parents on academic achievement is significant, parents also have a powerful role in developing their children’s character.

A considerable amount of research shows that three aspects of character are especially useful for successful learning – self regulation (the ability to regulate emotions and remain resilient), empathy (being able to imagine things from another person’s perspective) and persistence (being able to stick at things even when they are difficult).

Stop to think for a moment and you can see how, in evolutionary terms, each of these elements of learning character is helpful.

Take self-regulation first. Essentially this is the ability to manage emotions so that we do not have to do things the moment we feel the urge. It’s a about deferring gratification.

A famous experiment called the marshmallow test makes this clear. Offer a child a favourite sweet and then see if he or she can delay eating it on the promise of more sweets if they can wait for five minutes. Those who can defer eating until the adult returns are already exercising self-regulation.

Those who cannot and who greedily swallow the marshmallow without waiting have failed an elementary piece of Darwinian mathematics. For if they wait a few moments the food ‘harvest’ will be better.  The sooner children master this important piece of survival craft, the better they are likely to get on in life.

Empathy adds a social component to our ability to get on in the world. For once we have the ability to see things from the perspective of other people, we can start to imagine how the world looks through their eyes.

There is nowhere better to learn the skill of empathising than in the safe environment of a family. Seeing things from the perspective of another family member, acting out a role, reading a novel set in another time, talking about the news, learning about different cultures and different faiths – all of these are real-world examples of empathy in action.

And persistence brings together the ability to manage emotions and the capacity to work with others on challenging and worthwhile activities. Persistence is the ability to keep going when others give up. It requires us to deal with the feelings of difficulty we inevitably experience as we move out of our comfort zone, from what we can do already to more tricky tasks as yet unlearned.

It necessarily involves making mistakes and extracting the learning from them. For if a child gives up too easily, she will not get far in life or in learning.

Ask most parents what they want for their children and they will say talk about “happiness”, or “fulfilling potential” (as well as the most obvious “good university”, “good job” answer.)

But, of course, you cannot bestow happiness on anyone. Happiness is a by-product of other things. Most importantly happiness is a common outcome of learning. Achieving real wellbeing, as we now know through the work of experts like Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, is best done through engagement and absorption in worthwhile, slightly challenging activities. Good family learning, in other words.

Skills for tomorrow

As the world changes around us so do the kinds of skills which young people need to acquire. As well as being knowledgeable about a range of subjects, tomorrow’s citizens will need a range of wider skills. These will include some or all of the following:

Above all young people will have to become better and faster at transferring learning from one setting to another if they are to thrive.

In recognition of this, many GEMS schools are now focusing on six important learning “habits” or dispositions. These are:

• Emotional awareness
• International mindedness
• Adaptability
• Risk-taking
• Creativity, and
• Collaboration.

So your child, as well as learning about whatever subject is being taught, will also be given the opportunity to cultivate the kind of broader skills which will be required in 21^st century living.