Overly Helpful Parents May Be Teaching Kids To Be Helpless

By Susan Coney

According to award-winning educator Dr Frederic Jones, who wrote Tools for Teachers and Positive Classroom Instruction, the way you help your child in the early school years can affect his/her sense of competence and motivation in the later grades.

Jones writes, “It is instinctive for us to notice that a child is doing something wrong, tell him, show him how to do it right, and then stand or sit there to make sure he does it right. Actually, these are the steps for developing learned helplessness.” Further he states it is normal and OK. for new learning to be imperfect.

Assistant Superintendent Alice Jackson could not agree more with Dr Jones’s view on educating children. Ms Jackson, who is responsible for the curriculum and teacher development for Newtown schools, says that it is written in the school system’s mission statement that “we want our children to be self-directed learners.”

“We want our kids to feel and be competent. It is not always the finished product but the process. That is how the child learns and grows in his thinking,” Ms Jackson said.

There are natural pressures at school and from parents for children to produce a successful product. At home parents stress success and may pressure their child to succeed unintentionally. They may stand over them and be too attentive, and that can lead to learned helplessness and lack of self-motivation.

Ms Jackson says that it is perfectly normal for children to experience a level of discomfort when they are learning new and challenging things. She adds that there is confusion at the onset of learning and that is sometimes uncomfortable but normal as part of the process. It is how children learns to handle the discomfort that reflects whether they will go on to become lifelong learners.

Ms Jackson explains that when a child learns to ride a bike the parent encourages the child to try. If the child falls when the training wheels are first removed, the parent instinctively knows to encourage and praise the child. They feel confident that the child will learn how to master riding a bike. Even with the little bumps and scrapes that go along the way parents encourage the child to keep trying and keep with the process. Parents need to be aware that in reading, writing, and any type of learning kids are going to experience a level of discomfort and frustration that is completely normal.

If parents or educators continue to stand over the child and be ever-present, several negative ideas are transferred to the child. The child begins to become dependent on an adult to be able to do anything. The child may get work wrong just to receive more attention. Children quickly learn, that if they are stuck, someone must come to the rescue. They begin to believe that they can’t do it. They don’t self-start.

Ms Jackson uses materials written by Frederic Jones in teacher development workshops and encourages the Newtown teachers to implement the strategies Dr Jones suggests. “As part of our teaching program we follow the praise, prompt, and leave strategy,” Ms Jackson notes. “Dr Jones developed this strategy when he studied highly successful teachers, the naturals, to see how they made success look so easy.”

Dr Jones states, “Successful teaching is neither magic nor helpful hints; it is built around a handful of core competencies that are expressed in everything the teacher does.”

By promoting the praise, prompt, and leave motto you send a message to the child that they can be successful in their learning on their own. Praise. Point out what the child has done right. Prompt. Tell the child exactly what to do next. Make it simple. The more complex the instructions, the more likely the child is to experience confusion and performance anxiety. The more that is explained to the child, the less likely it is that all the information will be kept straight. Finally, leave. Trust the helping process. Give children brief instructions and tell them that you will check with them in a little while to see how they are doing.

According to Dr Jones, parents and educators are often guilty of teaching helplessness. Dr Jones recommends that the following messages commonly sent to kids be avoided. Don’t ask, “Where are you having trouble?’ or “What don’t you understand?” Don’t tell the child where you see the problem. Don’t give a “yes-but” compliment. Don’t use body language with sighs and moans of martyrdom. Avoid saying, “Let’s start at the beginning again.”

Ms Jackson summed it up by saying, “We want kids to have the tools to work everyday. The tools we grew up with are radically different than the tools of today. The greatest tool is to not be afraid of making a mistake. To learn something new and to have a sense that they are competent and capable of learning. We need to give them the tools to do just that.”