If you have a child struggling academically, it’s common to question their effort. This is especially true when your child shows academic abilities that are inconsistent.  

You may also hear feedback from his teacher like, “your child is bright, he just needs to try harder or be more motivated”.  

Underneath the Motivation Issues

For kids who are struggling, it’s usually true that there are motivation issues – procrastination with homework, avoiding difficult tasks, disliking school. But is “just try harder” the right approach to help a struggling student? Usually not. If your child is not motivated, it’s important to understand why. The answer often relates to the work being overly difficult. The truth is, most kids want to do well, but when it comes down to doing the work to do well, they lack motivation — and this causes confusion. 

Cognitive Skills and Motivation

The root cause of motivation issues usually relates to cognitive skills weaknesses that are making school more difficult and creating avoidance of difficult tasks. Homework frustration and lack of motivation usually relate to cognitive skills like attention, memory, processing speed, etc. not being as strong as they need to be. It is often worse when kids get home because they’ve kept it together all day at school, and now they have more homework – UGHH! 

This was the case for Aiden:

What Does the Research Say About Motivation?

Peer-reviewed research published in Frontiers in Education provides insights.  It shows in the control group that as academic difficulty increases year-over-year, oppositional behavior increases along with it.  Or said differently, when school gets more difficult, motivation suffers.  For the test group – students who trained with LearningRx – the research showed that our training made learning easier and, as a result, oppositional behavior decreased, and motivation increased.  

Get Out of the Cycle!

If you are spending day-after-day making sure your child is on top of their homework, having to push them to complete their work, it’s time to identify and address the root cause of these motivation issues.  

Give LearningRx Savage a call. Our 60-minute, cognitive skills assessment will identify the root cause as to why your child is struggling with motivation and more importantly, provide a path towards increased motivation.  

Results are from past clients. You or your loved ones may or may not achieve the same outcomes, but you can learn more about our research and results here.