31 January 2024
With the 2024 academic year officially underway, this period tends to be overwhelming for parents and learners, who have several adjustments to put in place for a successful academic year. Changing schools, starting a new grade or university transition, each level in your child’s education is just as important, and your support is significant to your child’s growth and development.
In a new academic year, discussing the new transition with your child/children is essential to ensure stability. Your support has an impact on your children’s development, learning, and subsequent educational outcomes. In this blog, UASA has put together a few guidelines to help parents know how to support their children better and achieve the best academic results at the end of the year.
Be present and establish discipline
Being a present parent makes your child’s academic journey easy and enjoyable. However, establishing discipline is as important. When you cannot step in and help as needed, your child must be independent and complete their academic tasks as required. As a parent, you are a support system; however, it is the child/children’s responsibility to ensure they reach their academic deadlines and goals.
Be proactive
Acquiring and enhancing cognitive abilities, maintaining concentration, and completing tasks on time will significantly benefit your child’s academic performance. This ability also helps your child study, complete assignments as assigned, and create prioritized daily to-do lists. Additionally, creating a calendar will enable students to schedule their time effectively and anticipate future deadlines.
Assist with studying
It’s essential to plan ahead. Every academic level is highly focused on grades; therefore, organizing their studies is crucial to success, mainly if your child participates in extracurricular activities. Remind them to take notes in class, categorize them, and go over them later at home. If your child is revising, offer to quiz them, focusing on any facts or ideas proving troublesome. If the material is beyond your abilities, you might get help from the teacher or consider connecting with a tutor.
Be calm and establish a support system
You can look up other parents like you who have children in schools and be part of that support structure. Or maybe a close family member or friend whom you can talk to help ease the parent academic anxiety you may be feeling.
Not only do children experience academic anxiety, but parents also do. Academic and financial obligations, extracurricular activities, aftercare, and meals, among other things, can be stressful for parents, hence the need for a support structure. As a parent, you are your child/children’s support structure; however, you also need support to ensure you can fulfil your other responsibilities.
Ref: www.kidshealth.org www.uasa.org.za