“He’s not motivated by much of anything”

All right, here we go with video number two on how to light the fire. If you haven’t seen video number one, you might want to check that out. It’ll give you a lot of background on what’s going on here.

Okay, first of all, how do we light the fire? What are some solutions to the problem of not being motivated when your kid has to do their work, or they have to at least do some of their work to get the results that they need?

All right, so first of all, remember the priority here. The priority here is to help your kid have a great future—not to get straight A’s, not to get into certain colleges, not to get great grades on standardized tests, or blah, blah, blah.

Your priority is to help your kid get whatever it is that they need in order to have a happy and successful life. They need to have some grit in order to have a happy and successful life. They need to have a happy childhood. They need to feel safe. They need to have skills in school. They need to know how to use a planner and manage time.

So they need to know a lot of things, but a lot of times we get way too focused on compliance, on grades, on doing what you’re told, on being a good boy or good girl. “Do your work,” blah, blah, blah.

So remember, the priority is: What do we need to give them to help them have a happy life now and in the future? What do they really need?

Always keep that priority in mind.

Now, when you’re trying to help a student—this is a lot of what I deal with—I get middle school and high school kids. Sometimes I work with college students and younger kids. Basically, I get kids who really have trouble getting motivated. They like to procrastinate. They avoid. They resist. They don’t want to start.

They may find the work meaningless, boring, or there may be any number of reasons that they don’t want to start.

So how am I going to take a student who really is having trouble starting and help them get moving on whatever it is?

A lot of times, parents, what you’re doing is making it too overwhelming for them. You’re actually making it worse by getting worked up and getting stressed out, and they’re getting even more stressed out and more resistant to doing their work.

Now, I know it’s a very hard balance, and it’s very hard to figure out what to say to them to motivate them. So that’s why I’m telling you this.

Part of what I do is I consider success in millimeters.

Okay, look, you have to put things in the right perspective. Your ability as a parent—or a teacher, if you’re watching this—if you’re going to help transform a child’s life and help transform their ability with task commitment, to get things done that they need to do, if you’re going to help them transform their ability to manage the extraordinary amount of tasks that are required to be successful in school, then you better look at millimeters.

And you better praise success in millimeters.

Every millimeter, every fraction of a millimeter of growth and progress and effort that they make, you better be rewarding. You better notice it. You better help them notice it.

The secret is that this is where it happens.

It’s extremely infrequent for my students to have a massive epiphany and a giant change. That’s not reality. It’s extremely rare. I don’t even know how I’d quantify it—one in a hundred times, maybe.

What you need to do is help them move in millimeters. That’s where the growth happens, and that’s where the change happens.

You put enough of the millimeters together, and eventually you have massive change. Once a lot of change starts happening, then things start to change much more easily.

But at the beginning, parents, you’ve got to understand this: it’s very small things that they’re doing, and that is where the solutions are going to come from.

So how do you help them move in millimeters?

Here’s some ways.

Let’s say that your child has a paper to write or math to do. You can sit down with them and say:

“All right, I know you don’t want to do this. You have 28 problems to do. I know it feels very overwhelming. Do you want to start with 3, 5, or 10 problems?”

And they might say, “Well, I’ll start with three.”

Cool. That’s better than zero.

See what I’m saying?

You have to get them started.

Oftentimes, once they start, then you can watch and their motivation will take them. The train is moving.

Okay, so if they’ve done three, it’s so much easier to do four and five. Before you know it, they might have the whole thing done, or half of it done.

And once they’re done with three, you can say:

“Great. Why don’t we keep going? Can you do one more? Can you do three more? Can you finish? Can you do the easy ones first? You don’t have to go in order. Who said you have to go in order? Why don’t you do these ones?”

So you have to, as a parent, think outside the box. How can I help them move in millimeters?

Now, there’s another way.

Basically, what you’re doing is chunking this by task. You’re saying, “Okay, we’ll do three or five or seven questions,” or whatever.

But you can also say:

“Hey, look, I need you to work on your homework. Can you do it for one minute, three minutes, or five minutes?”

Maybe they say one minute.

You need to figure out how you articulate it—five minutes, ten minutes, or fifteen minutes. You can use all different strategies with this.

But however you phrase it to them, the thing you need to understand is they need to feel emotionally safe.

If you say, “Do you want to do your homework for an hour, two hours, or three hours?” they’re going to be like, “No.”

That’s too much. It’s too overwhelming.

You have to make it feel emotionally safe.

Okay, so millimeters. Get tiny progress going.

If their backpack is a complete mess and you want to help them clean it, then you say:

“Hey, let’s clean one pocket of your backpack. Which one do you want to do?”

Or, again, you can use the false-choice concept:

“Let’s clean part of your backpack. Do you want to do one, two, or three pockets?”

Which one do you want to do?

Anything that they do that’s going to move them forward, you have to see that as a success and make them feel that, because that’s what’s going to get them more motivated.

You cannot be glass-half-empty here.

Scaffolding.

Scaffolding is when you take them from where they’re at and move them from here to here.

So often, I see teachers and parents. They see a child who’s here, and they want them to be here. That’s too big of a jump.

You have to support them to get to those next levels.

This is a very similar concept to the millimeters.

Let’s say you’re trying to figure out their threshold for writing a paper, and you say:

“All right, I need you to get started on your writing. Do you want to write one paragraph or two?”

And they say no.

You say, “Okay, can you write three sentences?”

No.

“Can you write one sentence?”

No.

“Can you write one word?”

No.

“Can you write a dot?”

“Yes.”

Okay, let’s start there.

You start with the dot and scaffold up.

That’s one way to explain it.

What I’m trying to say is: find their threshold, find where they’re at, and then help them up.

Now, a related side note.

If their homework is taking them two hours and they’re working very hard, and it takes them a long time to process what they’re doing, or they’re highly distractible, then you need to tell the teacher that it’s unreasonable.

Because it is.

It is unreasonable for homework to interfere with their life. They have to have a life.

So figure out what’s actually reasonable and whether the homework is meaningful and actually serving them.

If it’s helping their life, great—then push them a little bit.

But when a kid is spending so much time on homework, scaffold, help them move forward, or change the homework.

Advocacy.

When stuff is happening and it’s too much and it doesn’t make sense for your child to do that, fiercely advocate for your child.

Go in there and say:

“This isn’t cool. I don’t care what you’re saying.”

If they’re not listening, and the teacher doesn’t get it, and they think you’re attacking them or whatever, remember it’s not about the teacher. It’s about your child.

Your child is there to be served.

The teacher is not there to be served by the children as a compliant group of little robots.

Your children are there to be served by the teacher, by the educator.

So if they’re not doing what they need to do, advocate.

If they’re still not doing it, go to their superiors. Go to whoever you need to go to.

You’re all partners. You’re all trying to help the kids.

Sometimes people’s perception of what it means to serve a child is just off.

Maybe it’s from their upbringing and what they think school is supposed to be about. Maybe they think they’re supposed to make kids comply.

But when you feel something in your gut is wrong, advocate for them.

Sometimes it’s not even appropriate to try to motivate your kid to do something that’s not right for them and doesn’t help them.

I cannot tell you how important timers are.

This is one of the best investments you can make.

They’re ridiculously expensive for a stupid little piece of plastic with a tiny little battery in it, but have some digital timers around.

I use timers a lot to chunk work down for kids.

I can say:

“All right, do you want to work on it for one minute, three minutes, or five minutes?”

They tell me.

Then I teach them to set it.

It’s nice because it’s audible, so it makes the work more concrete for your child.

It’s also tactile. They actually touch it and press Start.

That helps get the brain focused on what they’re doing.

And it chunks it down into something very small.

Most of my kids don’t understand what time is.

If you say, “We’re leaving in five minutes,” they don’t really know what five minutes is.

A lot of times they don’t have a good gauge.

If I say, “How long will your homework take?” and they say, “Twenty minutes,” I’ll say:

“Cool. Let’s set it for fifteen and see where you’re at.”

A lot of times it takes forty-five minutes or whatever.

They’re often off.

These are great tools for kids to use to motivate themselves to start moving a millimeter forward.

A lot of it is a game about getting started and feeling successful with that.

Shrink it down.

We talked about that.

Chunk it with time and chunk it into tasks.

Also, what is good enough?

There’s forty problems. Do they really need to do forty problems?

If they have to write five pages, do they really have to write five pages?

Why five pages?

Because the teacher says so?

Does that mean they’re going to have a better future because they complied and wrote five pages?

Have them do their best.

Scaffold.

If they’re capable of doing two pages and they do two pages plus a half page, that’s a huge success for that kid.

You really have to look at what’s good enough.

Sometimes you just have to draw the line and tell the teacher, “This is where we’re at.”

Hopefully your teacher is supportive of that and understands how to help them have an experience of success instead of an experience of failure.

Who’s motivated by an experience of failure?

Modeling.

Parents, you can model a lot of things and do think-alouds, even for high school kids.

Let’s say you’re organizing your day.

You can kind of talk to yourself in front of your kid and say:

“Oh, I’m going to prioritize this event over this one. I’m not going to do that.”

You’re modeling what you want them to be thinking.

You’re showing them how you process, how you work through life, how you manage time, and how you manage tasks.

You’re thinking out loud so they can hear your process.

You don’t even tell them what you’re doing. You just do it.

They learn a lot by watching what we do.

They also learn when we model negativity, when we model our nervous systems going crazy, when our emotions aren’t in check.

When we as adults become dysregulated, we’re modeling that for them.

We’re teaching them:

“Hey, look. Get dysregulated when something happens that you don’t like. That’ll fix it.”

So we need to really think about what we’re modeling for our kids.

And patience.

A child’s brain is developing.

Most likely, your child’s going to be okay.

Yes, that does not mean don’t take measures to help your child. You absolutely should.

But be patient.

Their brain is changing.

This takes time.

Usually, when I’m working with a student, it takes anywhere from four to eight weeks before I start seeing changes where I’m like:

“Okay, their brain is finally changing. Now I’m really seeing a big change.”

It takes time for the neurons to rewire and for things to change.

Be patient.

It may take months. It may take years.

Don’t give up on them.

Don’t stop having the conversations.

Don’t worry about whether you’re having the conversations perfectly.

Just keep having them.

That’s what’s really important.

So these are several ideas about how to light a fire.

I know this was kind of a random video, but I hope I’m giving you, rather than step-by-step instructions, some vibes and some ideas for how to help motivate them.

But I think the main thing I want you to leave with is this:

Your child needs to feel emotionally safe if you are going to get them to take a micro-step toward doing what they need to do and toward success.

They need to feel not overwhelmed.

They need to feel like it’s something they can accomplish.

And they need to feel like it’s a success experience.

You might know in your mind that, “Oh my gosh, this is not where it needs to be. He or she needs to do X, Y, and Z.”

Also, the bar may feel incredibly low right now.

But you have to start where they’re at.

You have to move forward in a way that feels safe for them, or you’re just going to keep going around in circles.

You may have micro-breakthroughs every once in a while, but what you really want is multiple small breakthroughs right after each other.

Just millimeter after millimeter after millimeter.

You’ve got to trust me on this.

You’re not going to have some lecture with them and they’re suddenly going to see the light and change overnight.

That’s extraordinarily unlikely.

Your strategy is to give them micro-success experiences, make them feel safe, and really praise them.

Make them feel happy.

All right, that was a huge long YouTube video series.

I hope that was helpful.

I’ll see you soon.