Does your tween know how to study? Here’s how to teach them

From fifth or sixth grade and on, life starts to get a little more interesting. Try-outs for sports teams and stage performances start to become regular occurrences. Social lives and romantic interests start to dominate daydreams. Because of this, school itself can become an afterthought to many tweens just as the challenges of academia start to really emerge. 

It’s no wonder with all this happening that some kids struggle academically. 

What’s going on in their head?

For pre-teens or tweens, the medial prefrontal cortex is still developing — they do not have advanced social perspective taking skills yet — so when they are saying something, or yelling in frustration as you might be familiar with, they don’t always understand the impact that it has on the people around them. This is a skill developed closer to age 14 and on when they can really start to understand others’ viewpoints with empathy.

Another key brain component is that while the prefrontal cortex is still developing, the ventral striatum is super active, meaning kids are very sensitive to dopamine and endorphins, especially from peer affirmation. Now more than ever before, your kid wants to look and be cool. 

Plus, from an evolutionary perspective, this is the age they would have changed from relying on parental protection for survival to relying on peers. Being alone was often a matter of life or death in the wild, and it still feels like a matter of life or death in school as fitting in becomes more and more important. 

To recap, here are the reasons academics can start to take a backseat for many students:

• Their perspective and predicting-future-impact skills are lacking, 
• their attention is fixated on fitting in, 
• and they have an evolutionary drive to be accepted by their peers. 

So how do you get them to study? It turns out, that’s the wrong question. The real question is: does your kid know how to study?

‍Learning how to study

To succeed in school, in sixth grade all the way through higher ed, your kid needs to be able to make a plan to balance their various obligations and prepare for all of them. For your kid to learn this skill, you need to STOP and TEACH, rather than STOP and DO. This sets the foundation for how they will plan everything moving forward. This isn’t just true for studying, but in most aspects of supporting your tween as they mature.

The best way to ensure academic priorities are met is by learning HOW to study in this new context, not just repeatedly asking your student to make the time or by offering to make a study plan on their behalf.

Think back to school. How did you learn to study? Not just cram for the exam by reading everything the night before, but really study. The question probably conjures images of flash cards and timelines, quiet libraries and missed nights out; you had to make a plan in order to be prepared. That’s the backbone of studying, after all, planning — and while it’s something every kid needs to learn, it isn’t something that’s often taught. 

As parents and caregivers, it’s easy to take a look at a kid’s upcoming academic challenges and map out a plan. I’ll make flashcards for you on Monday, you’ll study those cards on Tuesday, you’ve got a meet on Wednesday, and the test is Friday, so unfortunately you’ll have to skip movie night on Thursday to practice test questions with me. You as the adult know this plan will work because you understand how memory consolidation works: rehearsing information over time is what helps turn that information into a long-term memory. You, as an adult, also have a lot of practice planning ahead–especially for your kid. 

In this scenario though, your kid might learn how atoms and molecules are structured, but they didn’t learn how to study. You did that part for them. You can still help them learn to make a plan, but remember: it’s stop and teach. Let them handle the “doing.”

When your kid cares more about fitting in than getting the grade

Offering guidance on how to better succeed in school is great, but what happens when your kid doesn’t want to succeed? What happens when studying isn’t “cool”? 

First, you have to level-set with your kid. If their peers are cruising through with Bs, and telling their friends that they’re “not even studying”, you need to get real with your kid and let them know their peers probably are studying — they just don’t want to admit it. Your kid isn’t the only one who wants to seem cool. 

Second, let them know that while they might feel cool for the lunch period where they brag about not caring, failing will not help them. In fact, it will only create stress and impact their ability to do the things they want to do, like participate in sports given that grades increasingly play a role in whether or not you can be on the team. 

And lastly, give them examples of people they think are cool who worked hard in school. From fashion to football, there are myriad examples of how much farther academic excellence will take someone over sheer talent. (Both the Receiver miniseries and Sprint on Netflix are great examples of this for athletics.)

At this age, kids should have interests that expand past academics, but that doesn’t mean they can’t fit everything in. They just need to learn how.