Why Can’t I Motivate My Teenager to Revise for Their GCSEs?

I have friends, adult grown up friends, who have expensive gym memberships. And I’m talking the type of expensive where you are forced to take a sharp inhale of breath at the utterance of the cost - and are required to wind your jaw shut. I’m talking several thousands of pounds a year. Great British Pounds. I catch up with them at a Sunday BBQ:

“Hey, how’s the gym going?”

“Haven’t been yet.” They’ll reply, “but I’m definitely going to start going soon.”

Meanwhile, as they are trying to find the motivation, they might as well be withdrawing hundreds of pounds a month from a cash machine and setting it on fire.

Bear with me, I swear I’m getting somewhere with this.

Lots of us - adults, that is - struggle to motivate ourselves. In fact, I’d probably go so far as to say that we all would find something in our lives that we would do anything to avoid.

Our children are no different. They probably learnt it from us!

So, in our quest to try and motivate children, perhaps we should look at ourselves and consider how we are able to encourage ourselves to sometimes do what we might not want to do. And that’s where we may begin to see the divergence of the adult brain vs the mid-teenager brain… (I am not a scientist!)

Adults are able to contextualise their life, fairly effectively, through time in a way that teenagers can’t. We’ve lived more, have more memories, more experience. We have learnt over the years, tangibly, what it’s like to drag yourself through something you didn’t want to do. You’ve seen the result, you’ve seen the benefit, and logged it emotionally; deep down in your psyche. For many teenagers, preparing for GCSEs is probably the first time they’ve ever really had to dig deep to do the thing they really don’t want to do - revise, study, prepare. What I often ask hard to motivate students to do is write down, or map out, what the following years after their GCSEs look like. A sort of mood board of their major life steps. College, sixth form, apprenticeships, uni - all of these milestones require a foundation of education, GCSEs. They all acknowledge how devastated, how heartbroken they would be if they didn’t get to live out their dream and I always say; you may end up being one or two bad exam papers away from not getting the grade you might need to get you on that journey. I’ve shown them the future, a world in which the college or sixth form exists, their friends attend their lessons and courses - loving it - but they aren’t there with them. They’re left behind. This is a great motivator. It’s like what we, as adults, do by remembering times we had to push ourselves, but in reverse. Showing them the future - not the past - and motivating themselves through that.

Little and often is the way. Help them realise this, get ahead of the problem. It’s much easier to motivate someone to do something for an hour than to encourage them to do something that requires four or five hours to get done. If you start early, with enough runway before the GCSE exam period, you can ease them into work. They may resist starting revision or preparation work so early - none of their friends are starting yet, why should they - but show them a future of themselves where they aren’t rushing to get hours of work done in a rampant rampage. Where they’ve laid the groundwork through an hour here or there in the lead up, now meaning they aren’t as rushed, and they’ll be able to motivate themselves much more through those final few steps.

Rewards. This is a big one for me actually. I personally respond really well to giving myself rewards for doing something I might not want to do. We may have actually embedded this encouragement through their youth; do the washing up, you can have the chocolate. Tidy your room and you can have the games console. Get them to put something they really love on the line, set it as the reward, and release it after the task is complete. Yes, it requires discipline, but that’s also something that they can learn through this process. Their whole lives have involved some form of discipline up to this point, whether from home or from school, it’s not going to be an alien concept - it’s something they need to utilise and access within themselves.

And that leads me to my closing thought. This stuff isn’t hard. It’s not rocket science. It’s recognising a benefit, establishing a target, and executing a task. We do it all day every day without realising. Sure, back in the day, if you didn’t hunt the thing or pick the berries you weren’t going to eat - that’s a pretty good motivator, but even in today’s world of relative ease there is still a sense in human nature of; I do Y and I get X. They need to find their why. Or you can help them find the why. Remember, you’ve lived it. You are probably their greatest window into the future. So, what did you have to sacrifice to get where you are today? How did you motivate yourself to do it? Start with that, and help them to understand that motivation and sacrifice is a part of the human experience. It’s their first shot at it, there will be others, but this is their moment to explore their willpower in a way they may not have needed to before. With our guidance, as parents and as a GCSE English tutor working alongside you, we are looking at a much more productive generation. Something I’m sure we can all agree we need.

If you’d like help motivating your child and putting a real GCSE revision plan in place, feel free to get in touch with me directly here.

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