Motivating children: Teach them the importance of time management

As a parent, one of the best things I have taught my kids is the importance of managing their time, especially when it comes to balancing homework with other things. Most kids would prefer to spend their "home time" not thinking about school, school work and especially homework. So as a parent it is important for us to teach them about the importance of not leaving things to the last minute. As you and I know, if we do leave things to the last minute AND we don't get reprimanded for doing so, we have started the process of letting our brains know we can procrastinate AND get away with it.

As children become students in higher education the work loads get bigger. More subjects, more in depth research required to complete the assignments. More reasons to party. Now I am not saying that you shouldn't party - but it comes down to balancing study time with social time, if you spend all your spare time down the local pub you are hardly going to get the grades you need in order to move on to the next phase of your career. Of course if you don't want an advanced degree and are going to be happy in a dead end job doing the same things for the rest of your born days, then stop wasting everyone's time and go and get a job.

I have seen so many cases whereby parents have spent their entire life savings on their children's education, only to have those same children party their entire time through university and college....and then think the world owes them a living when they don't get the grades...hint - it doesn't.

Now as a parent it is also important not to project your own educational shortcomings onto your kids...all you can do is offer guidance and support and as we have mentioned, the biggest thing you can teach your children, apart from respect for others is how to manage their time.

And you do a lot of that by example. If you spend all your time on social pursuits, watching the television, going down the local pub - and then rushing at the last minute to complete a project you are working on - it hardly sets the best example now does it.

Set the homework priorities:

At the start of each term and as the beginning of each week begins, it is important in the child's younger years to sit down with them and explain how they should structure their evenings in order to get their homework done on time, and still have time left over to do those other important things in a child's life.

One other thing you can do to ensure your child spends more time on homework and less time on the Internet is to give them a stand alone computer for their school work and only access to the internet when it is absolutely necessary (for research purposes) and after homework is completed. But we also know how hard that is to enforce. And if you can avoid doing so, then please do not encourage televisions and other electronic devices in bedrooms - game consoles for example. Children will say they are working on their homework, but you wander in to check how they are doing and sure enough they are "playing".