A PARENTS ROLE IN THEIR CHILD’S EXAM PREPARATION

One of the greatest factors in determining a child’s success at school and in exams is the amount of support they have at home. This directly implies that parents have a very significant role to play in helping their children go through the exam phase with the right frame of mind.

Our actions as parents can either motivate the children to put in a lot of effort or add onto their stress at this point in time.

There are many significant roles you can play, we are not able to list all of them here, we will simply highlight the main ones.

Role #1: Demonstrate And Communicate A High Value For Education In The Family Environment.

As a parent preparing your child for exams, you need to value education and your child needs to see that you do. Most children tend to pick exam confidence and learning attitude cues from their parents. Your role as a parent is to help the child to realize that learning and exams are important, that it can be fun and that it has to be done. When you place a high value on education, both in words and deeds, the odds are great that your child will as well.

Role #2: Setting Academic & Performance Expectations

A parent’s expectation on academic and performance influence their child’s expectation and academic success. Your expectations on learning and performance directly affect the quality and amount of parent-child communication about school.  Research confirms that your parental expectations affect your child’s own aspirations and expectations. Families with high educational aspirations for their children tend to provide more out-of-school learning opportunities for them. Top achieving students reported that their parents expected them to attend schools without fail and to perform better. Such students were observed by their teachers to have had a better record of attendance and more positive attitudes toward learning and exam preparation.

Role #3: Being a Consistent Model of Support

When preparing for a major exam, your child needs a Consistent Model of Support to provide them with the right blend of positive influence. As a parent of a teenage girl or boy, remember that the influence that you have over your child is more dependent on a trusting relationship than it is on how much authority you wield in their lives or the performance lectures you dish out to them.

Role # 4:

Supporting Your Child to Develop Intrinsic Motivation

One of the most significant factors of performance is Motivation. While some children find it easy to light and sustain their inner desire to perform, other struggle and never seem to have the desire to study and/or perform well in their exams. Your  role as a parent is  to encourage your son/daughter with positive and negative persuasion to do what is hard or what he/she may not want to do but needs to do for  his/her best interest.

Role # 5: Constant Supervision

Even though your child is becoming an independent person, it is important to make sure that they are well supervised. Constant supervision in the context of exam preparation refers to making clear effort to check that your child has maintained a consistency of effort. There are so many distractions in our society today.  Parental supervision means looking after and monitoring your child’s activities. Constant supervision can help your child to remain focused on the main learning activities he/she has to undertake. It also involves making sure your child has finished their homework, academic tasks he/she started and keeping them away from time wasting pursuits. Constant supervision when executed well can increase their child’s exam preparation effectiveness and productivity.