How to POSITIVELY push your child

Hey, what’s up, parents and teachers? This is Seth with SethPerler.com, and today I’m going to make a relatively short video compared to what I usually do.

I want to talk about the concept of how far to push a student.

I’m an executive function coach based out of Boulder, Colorado, and I help struggling students figure out how to navigate this thing called school and education. What I want to discuss today is how I help students move forward and how I encourage growth. This is especially relevant for parents because finding the right balance can be incredibly challenging.

I’m going to explain how I approach this philosophically, and hopefully you can apply this concept in your own family or classroom.

One of the ways I describe my job as an executive function coach is with the saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” My job is to help make the horse drink.

The number one problem I deal with among all my students is resistance. My students resist doing homework, self-starting, following through, asking teachers for help, checking online grades, studying, reading, advocating for themselves, communicating honestly with their parents, and accepting support from others.

Resistance is the biggest challenge they face.

If students do not learn how to work through that resistance—if they don’t develop the internal dialogue and mindset needed to move forward despite discomfort—they are literally limiting their opportunities, possibilities, and choices in life. They are affecting the type of future they can create for themselves.

So they need to learn a different relationship with resistance.

Going back to the horse-and-water analogy, my goal is to help students do things they don’t feel like doing: homework, using a planner, building productive habits, creating daily plans, organizing their materials, maintaining systems, and so on.

These are things that benefit them in the long term, but in the short term they don’t want to do them. They don’t feel like it. It’s not fun, interesting, or preferred. So they procrastinate, avoid, and dig deeper holes for themselves, closing off opportunities along the way.

So how do I help them move forward?

One of the most important strategies I use is baby steps.

I talk about baby steps and micro-successes all the time. Parents and teachers often hope for big breakthroughs or dramatic transformations, but those are actually quite rare.

What I aim for is:

• Bit by bit

• Step by step

• Micro-success by micro-success

• Millimeter by millimeter

That’s what creates lasting change.

Just as negative habits can snowball into bigger problems, positive habits can create positive momentum. However, positive momentum requires patience, persistence, effort, and a willingness to appreciate very small wins.

The concept I really want to share today is this:

No matter what we’re working on—homework, planners, organization, writing a paper, emailing a teacher, advocating for themselves, or communicating with parents—I am constantly evaluating where the student is relative to their comfort zone.

My goal is to push them beyond their comfort zone.

If we never push students beyond their comfort zone, we risk enabling them. We risk keeping them stuck. We don’t help them discover what they’re capable of or give them opportunities to grow.

However, there is another boundary I pay attention to: the threshold.

I want to push students beyond their comfort zone, but not beyond their threshold.

If I push them too far, they stop listening. They stop cooperating. They become defensive, frustrated, withdrawn, or resistant. They no longer allow me to help them.

This is something parents experience all the time. They push too hard, and suddenly the student shuts down. The excuses start. The arguments begin. Nothing productive happens.

On the other hand, if we don’t push students at all, they stay comfortable, stuck in their excuses and avoidance patterns.

So there is a very important gray area:

The space between the comfort zone and the threshold.

That is where I do my best work as a coach.

That is where teachers do their best work.

And that is where parents do their best work.

The challenge for parents is that emotions, family dynamics, old patterns, and personal triggers can make it much harder to stay in that gray zone.

But philosophically, this is what we should all be aiming for:

Help students move beyond their comfort zone in a positive and supportive way, without pushing them beyond their threshold.

In that gray area, students can learn the skills, habits, routines, systems, mindsets, and self-awareness they need to build a successful future filled with opportunities, possibilities, and choices.

So to summarize:

• Don’t keep students trapped in their comfort zone.

• Don’t push them beyond their threshold.

• Work in the space between the two.

In my opinion, that’s where growth happens.

I just wanted to share that concept with you today.

I hope you’re having a great school year. It’s March right now, and this is what I call “The Dip.” If you’ve watched my video about The Dip, you know this is often the time of year when students start struggling. They’ve dug some holes for themselves, and now they have to swim upstream for the rest of the semester.

If your child is experiencing that, check out my video on The Dip.

And if everything seems fine but you’re not completely sure, check their online grades and communicate with teachers to get clarity about how things are really going.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today.

I hope you’re doing amazing, and I’ll see you next week.