Helping your child study better

This guide is psychoeducational content. It replaces neither the teacher's view nor an assessment. If your child has lasting difficulty reading, writing or counting despite the help given, if they are inattentive or restless in every setting of their life, or if they refuse to go to school, talk to the teacher and the doctor: section 14 says which signs mean you shouldn't wait. If your child talks about dying or is harming themselves, call your doctor the same day. Allow thirty minutes of reading.

1. Before you begin

Who this guide is for

For you if evening homework has become an ordeal. Getting started takes negotiation, your child falls apart at the first difficulty, you raise your voice, and everyone ends the evening exhausted.

For you if your child spends time on their lessons, recites them perfectly in the evening, and can't remember them the next day in class.

For you if you don't know what role to take: helping at the risk of doing it for them, or stepping back at the risk of leaving them to struggle alone.

For you, finally, if you are worried: they read slowly, they mix up numbers, they "don't concentrate", and you wonder whether it is a lack of effort or something else.

For older teenagers who organise their own work, and for you if you are going back to study, our programme How to study better is written directly for the learner. This guide takes up its principles from the parent's point of view.

What this guide is not

It is not a manual for homeschooling. Teaching belongs to the school. Your role is different, and it is powerful.

It is not a method for getting better marks at any cost. A child who learns well and enjoys learning generally gets better marks; the reverse is not true.

It is not a diagnostic tool. It won't tell you whether your child has a disorder. It will tell you when that question deserves to be asked.

How to use it

Read it through once. Then choose one thing to change — the time and place of homework, the way you help with revising a lesson, the way you praise — and keep it up for three weeks. Changing ten things at once mainly creates confusion, for your child and for you.

2. What a parent can really change

What matters most

Research on parents' involvement in schooling gives a clear and somewhat surprising message. The amount of homework help is not what makes the difference. What matters is how it is given.

Involvement that helps looks like this: taking an interest in what the child is learning, holding high expectations expressed with warmth, setting up a regular routine, letting the child do the work and helping them find the answer rather than giving it, seeing mistakes as a step along the way.

Involvement that harms looks like this: constant monitoring, doing it for them, getting angry at mistakes, promising or threatening depending on marks, comparing with a brother, sister or classmate. The child then learns that school is about pressure and judgement, and tries to avoid rather than to understand.

In practice, a parent who understands nothing about secondary-school maths can help a great deal — through the routine, interest and the way they react. A brilliant parent can do harm — if they turn every evening into an exam.

What happens outside homework

Much of what helps a child learn happens away from the desk.

Talking. Everyday conversations, questions, explanations about the world and rich, precise vocabulary feed the understanding of everything that will be read later.

Reading together, and having books at home, from a very young age.

Getting enough sleep. A tired child learns badly, remembers badly and controls themselves badly. It is often the most underestimated lever.

Playing. Board games, construction toys and card games train arithmetic, attention, waiting your turn and coping with losing.

Setting an example. A child who sees their parents read, look things up, learn something new and talk about it understands that learning isn't just for school.

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