Hi, I'm Kurt. I'm a personal and executive coach at noomii.com, and I specialize in scientifically proven techniques for achieving more success and happiness in life. I'm going to be talking about how to help your children with homework. The most important thing when you're helping your child with their homework is that you don't focus on the mechanics of it. So, it's not just about helping them with their spelling or their grammar or a particular math problem. You have to look at the reason why they came to you for help in the first place. It's usually not because they're good at the subject or they really like it, or they wouldn't come to for your help in the first place. It's usually because they're having difficulty or they lack the self-confidence in their abilities to do the homework assignment. So, there's three principles I'm going to talk about for how to solve that problem, the deep, underlying, root cause for their asking for help. The first thing you want to do is you want to believe in them. You want to instill confidence in them by having confidence in them yourself. There's a famous educator named Marva Collins who said that she believed 100 percent in all of her students. And she always gave them 100 percent of her abilities and dedication no matter what. She did not give up on them. And if you do that with your kid, if you don't give up on them, you keep telling them reassuring comments that they can do it, that they have the ability, that will spill out to them and they'll be able to have more self-confidence in themselves because they see that you believe in them. The second thing you want to do is you want to give them self-confidence in their abilities by getting them to think about other times when they had difficulties with this particular subject or another equally hard subject. So, you want to ask them think about a time when you had a homework assignment that you found really difficult, but that you actually did really well in. And when they do that, they're going to give themselves more confidence in this particular assignment because they're going to hopefully transfer that belief and that result from what they did at that time to what they're trying to do now. And the third thing you want to do is internalize their reasons for doing the homework. Now, homework is one of those things that usually kids don't do of their own volition. It's forced on them by their teacher. It's not something they particularly like, usually. But you want to ask them why is it important for you to do well on this assignment? And they might not be a math major in college. Maybe they want to go into English, or business or something else, but if you ask them that question, they may stop and realize that even though this is not my particular strength, if I do at least a good enough job to get a good enough passing grade, it will get me those grades I need to get into college and what I really want to do. Or whatever their other goals in life happen to be. So, you want to give them that internal motivation to do the homework and that will really boost them through that difficult time that they're having. So remember those three principles in addition to the mechanics of the homework that you're helping them with and best of luck.
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