I love my kids more than I ever imagined I could. And yet I also have a responsibility to be firm and resolute when it comes to school and grades and putting efforts into assignments. They're both fully capable of being A & B students with very little effort. But very little effort is what's being made to achieve and maintain those grades. Although I've no belief that middle school grades will carry forward, as I tried to tell my son last night while discussing his going to tutoring in the mornings in order to get so low grades back up, the routines and practices he's establishing today will carry forward. And the path that leads him to be a success in his adult life is being paved today.
He was adamantly against going to tutoring when I dropped him off. He argued it intensely. And I stayed calm until I left. Only to have him call me 5 min later refusing to go and saying it we didn't agree to it. So I told him it's not his choice, as his parent this is my direction to him, he has to do it, and until his grades are all back on an acceptable level, anything/everything that's a 'privilege' is off the table. Snowboarding, screens, having friends over… all of it. Because he's refusing, he's losing. By turning it around, he'll gain higher ground.
He hung up on me. Where he got this defiant attitude is beyond me. :-/
I am trying to balance my role and my responsibility with the awareness of my own experiences of the same kind re. academics in middle/high school. I didn't make efforts, nobody pushed me to, and I regret it now. I want them both to succeed in ways that I did not. But I would not have been easily convinced t make more efforts then, either.
Parenting is hard. I have to keep reminding myself that there will be a point at which it's reflected on and hopefully appreciated, just like kids that become musicians reflect on having hated been forced to learn an instrument.