FamilyRoom Rethinking Kids’ Grades

When I stopped focusing so much on the letters and numbers on my kids’ report cards, everything changed for the better. by SALINA JIVANI

I still remember the day my fourth grader brought home her first C. She’d always been a sharp student with a voracious appetite for learning, and the grade contrasted with her usual steady stream of A’s and B’s. Of course my first reaction was to round up the troops, so to speak, and figure out what the problem was. My husband and I met with her in her room to discuss the rogue grade and why it was there along with mostly B’s, with none of the usual A’s in sight.

She told us she didn’t understand what the teacher was trying to teach, and that she’d liked her other teacher — one who’d retired midyear and been gone after winter break — better. I took these statements with a grain of salt, thinking that perhaps the TV or electronics were stealing her focus from school.

Then parent-teacher conferences happened, and we met with her new teacher. She’d transitioned from teaching in another state where the requirements weren’t nearly as rigorous as they were where we live, she admitted with tired eyes, so the semester had been a challenge. Her struggles, I realized, were apparent in her students’ grades. My heart went out to her and to them.

From the time my daughter was a toddler, I’d invested in books, math games, phonics puzzles and an endless reservoir of resources centered around learning. Good grades meant it was working and were rewarded with bigger allowances, more sleepovers and generous Christmas gifts. With so much invested in her educational uplift, I’d come to view her grades as a reflection of my own success, and this C was screaming that I’d failed.

But that moment in the classroom was pivotal for me. I began questioning just how wise I’d been to place so much emphasis on those letters peeking out from report cards over all these years. What did they reflect that we, as parents, never even considered?

The Parent Trap

According to Brent Sweitzer, a professional counselor in private practice, parental involvement plays a significant role in grades. “Children pick up on parents’ anxiety about school performance and can internalize it,” he says. “On the other hand, parents’ lack of involvement can prevent children — particularly those diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia or other learning differences — from developing healthy habits that will serve them later in life.”

The solution, then, is learning how to balance how much you get involved and when. “One of the most important learnings for children,” says Sweitzer, “is to be able to trust themselves, but that can only happen when we trust them.” A way to establish that trust, he believes, is by letting children be responsible for their own work based on what’s developmentally appropriate. In addition, we need to give them room to learn through mistakes — including a few bombed tests and assignments — and offer them lots of about school and how you felt about them,” Sweitzer says. “Unconsciously, you may be repeating what was done to you.”

When kids struggle, Sweitzer believes parents should first try to understand why. For instance, adults can struggle at work for many reasons: inadequate support or training, emotional or relationship issues, being in the wrong job and so on. A good boss will have faith in their employees’ capabilities, dig deeper out of curiosity about their struggles, listen with an attentive ear and offer resources to help. Children need such things too.

Shift Attention

Most parents drink from the same well when it comes to report cards: Grades mean everything. With this concentrated focus on academic achievement, are we coming up short elsewhere? It turns out we might be, especially when it comes to areas like emotional intelligence.

Emotional learning is what lets people understand and manage emotions, feel and express empathy for others, attain positive goals, maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions. “Though hard to quantify, emotional intelligence is vital for thriving,” says Sweitzer. “We give lots of attention and resources to formal schooling, but we often don’t give the same attention to our children’s inner lives and their capacity to form and maintain healthy relationships. But research shows that the quality of our relationships — not our income level or our educational background —  is key to a satisfying life, particularly in industrialized nations.” chances to improve on those mistakes.

Sweitzer suggests that parents start by listening: Ask kids how they feel about their grades and where they think they need assistance. “This helps you know more about their strengths and weaknesses in school,” says Sweitzer, “but it’s also a way to express how much you care for them.” Had I asked questions earlier about my daughter’s struggles with her new teacher, I would have been less likely to feel so taken aback by that C.

Parents also need to tune in to their own anxieties about kids’ school performance. “It can be helpful to reflect on the messages you got from your own parents

According to Marc Brackett, Ph.D., author of Permission to Feel and the founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, early childhood is the perfect time to instill emotional intelligence in kids. Brackett offers ageappropriate tips, such as acknowledging and naming children’s feelings, helping them identify what calmness feels like in their bodies and using sensory tools such as squishy balls or glitter jars. Also great for leverage for emotional learning, he says, are books. “When reading storybooks, talk about how the characters might be feeling,” he explains. “Discuss why they are feeling that way and whether they would want to continue to feel that way — and, if not, what they could do to change the feeling.”

For older kids, emotional intelligence also includes understanding how to behave online, in terms of both safety and being a good person. This could encompass things like learning to be cautious and responsible on the Web, avoid risky situations and be cognizant of their surroundings in the digital world — an additional type of smarts parents can help instill in their children.

Another important area of focus is financial skills. Most students spend years learning to solve increasingly challenging math equations in school (often ones that, though we tell them the opposite, they’ll never use again). And while they also learn the basics of dollars and cents as soon as kindergarten, these foundational skills don’t count for much in real life.

The Handbook of Consumer Finance Research states that many kids show poor ability to make age-appropriate financial decisions in their own best interests. And those who come from families with greater financial resources are usually more financially literate than those from families that are less well-off, which exacerbates the inequality between these groups.

To give kids a leg up once they exit the classroom environment and enter the world of bills and expenditures, parents can teach them to budget their money, live within their means, save and keep track of expenses. A credit card might be an option for young adults, and a bank account to keep track of funds may be a good place to deposit their allowance, teaching them to manage and invest money digitally. Collectively, these skills can translate to a healthier, more stable financial outlook for these future adults.

Though there are many types of intelligence that can make children more wellrounded and successful individuals, don’t view these potentially missed areas of focus as a reason to devalue tutoring sessions or chess club enrollment. Instead, think of them as supplemental avenues to help your child gain a more comprehensive understanding of the world around them.

Even several years after that first C, de-emphasizing grades doesn’t always come easily to me. I have to remind myself that it’s only when I allow my kids opportunities to stumble that they’ll have a chance to flex their muscles and lift themselves up —  stronger and more resilient every time. I know I won’t be here forever, and gifting them with independence and perseverance will be my legacy — one I hope they’ll carry, to their benefit, throughout their lives.

News Alert

Updated Developmental Markers for Kids

Are the recently released CDC guidelines actually helpful?

by MARISA LASCALA

Heads-up for parents: Earlier this year, the CDC revised the milestones it uses to help caregivers track children’s development for the first time since they were created in 2004. These markers are used to make sure children are hitting goals like rolling from tummy to back (which babies can typically do by 6 months), saying “Mama” or “Dada” or another special word for a caregiver (12 months) or clapping when excited (15 months). With these revisions, the CDC has streamlined the milestones to make them easier to understand and added checklists for a few ages. Markers are now laid out for every well-child checkup from 2 months through 5 years. But the biggest change is that the revised milestones are ones most children would be expected to achieve by the specified age. “Before, the milestones represented what about half of children typically achieved by each age; now they represent what at least threefourths of children achieve by each age,” says Emily Edlynn, Ph.D., a child clinical psychologist and author of the blog The Art and Science of Mom and the upcoming book Parenting for Autonomy

This may have the benefit of saving parents some unnecessary grief. “With the previous version of the checklist, when a child didn’t reach a milestone, a wait-and-see approach was often used anyway,” Edlynn says, since half of kids that age hadn’t reach the milestone. But the holding pattern could be worrisome to parents, who just had to sit tight and see if their kids would pick up the skill on their own or if intervention was needed.

Now that worry is lessened, but “some children’s delays may not be caught as early as they would have been with the previous guidelines,” Edlynn says.

“The American Speech-LanguageHearing Association is concerned about a possible risk of language delays being missed based on the new checklists.”

Still, the CDC emphasizes that the milestones are just one tool for keeping track of a child’s development. “These checklists are meant to guide, but not to screen or evaluate,” Edlynn says.

“If you have a concern about your child’s development, bring it up with your pediatrician whether or not it is on the checklist.”