By: Bec Harris
What’s really behind a child who says, “I hate school”?
Natalie Nicholls, Specialist in Educational Neuroscience & Cognitive Development, and Creator of PLECS Learning discusses apathy in learning.
Starting from a young age, children can develop a reluctance to go to school. Natalie explained some of the causes of this.
Fire and Smoke
Natalie says its a common struggle for parents who cannot get their children to do their homework or focus. Then it becomes an issue of them not wanting to go to school.
“I wanted to talk today about thinking about it differently, right? And understand that as human beings, we are born to learn, right? We are, toddlers are born to touch everything and put everything in their mouth, right? That’s how we’re learning.”
She explained that as children grow, they can hit a state where they say things that shock us and they might not enjoy what we expect them to.
“We may get angry at that initially because it triggers something in us, right? It triggers maybe something that we’ve been mapped with earlier on.”
Some parents choose to ignore the signs, others push their children further.
“All of these responses, these top three responses which we’re looking at, they relate to our symptom, which is like if you think about it of a fire and smoke. The smoke is what you’re seeing with your kids saying, I don’t want to do this and I don’t want to do my spelling, I hate reading, I hate going to school, right? But what if we could have a look at the fire and think about how we could stop the fire and put out that fire.”
What Fire Can We Explore?
Talking specifically about younger children, Natalie explains the distinction between developmental thinking and the ages leading up to that.
“After we get to age 8, we have a little bit more of a different thinking capacity. So when we love doing something, it’s important we understand it isn’t a personality trait as such. We may have interests, like interest in cars, interest in Lego, interest in drawing and things like that. But from day one, from our development, we are here on who we are and your child is who they are.”
Mapped Genetics
Natalie said they have been mapped through a combination of experiences and their genes.
“When we start to understand that whatever age they’re at or where we are at now, a combination of our genes and our environment have mapped us to who we are today.”
It means that once they start being defiant, we can move past it being an attempt to just be stubborn and onto how can we better help them.
“Is it hard for them to do? This is what I really want you to think about. Is it hard for them to do?” posed Natalie.
It involves parents taking down their pride wall, not seeing it as a reflection of themselves and finding reasons why the child may be avoidant.
Nature and Nurture
“We’re always going to want to address the smoke, which is the comments.”
She said it is more important to look at the why. It is always linked to some kind of emotion.
“Our emotion and our safety state always comes first,” said Natalie. “It’s not something we think about, it’s just in us. So we may have had in the past previous experiences that we haven’t enjoyed involving reading, spelling, writing, maths or even going to school.”
Dopamine
Natalie said switching subjects helps to single out the difficulties. Children won’t avoid what they genuinely enjoy and are developing skills in.
“When you feel like you can do something really well, then you will do it often because you get a really good dopamine release. Whereas for me, I’m not going to go pick up crochet because I can’t, that’ll make me feel really frustrated.”
Natalie said that frustrations over certain school subjects are common, and it is also quite common to accidentally put that pressure or feel angry when children resist.
“Particularly in those under years, under age 8, year one and two, the levels jump quite high. From Kindergarten to Year 2, the academic demand is very high and some children are not developmentally there yet.”
Natalie said encouraging them to read is important, but understanding there are weaknesses in the brain that haven’t full developed is also crucial.
Our Response
“One thing I’ve really, really struggled with is understanding why our curriculum expects every child to pick up the learnings,” said Natalie, “If you don’t, you just move to the next year. Whereas if you do karate, you do swimming, you have levels.”
She explained in extra-curriculars, you have to achieve the previous level before you go up. Within the school, there will be children that will continue to fall behind if they are not achieving at the expected level, yet moving up in their year group.
“When actually we must be looking at, well, they need to be achieving these things, so if they’re not, what else can we be doing?”
Natalie explained that working as a team with parents and the school will help the child along.
ADHD Diagnosis
“I also caution a lot of families out there to just… There’s so many people going, it’s just ADHD and we’ll just diagnose it and then fix it. That’s not what happens, right? The diagnosis may give you some kind of understanding, but all the symptoms and what’s happening, the fire is still there, right?”
“Alter the environment so that it is achievable. Find out what their level actually is because the level you’ve actually provided is too high.”
Struggling to Sit
For the children who can’t sit still in the classroom, Natalie said there will be multiple reasons why.
“They are highly likely finding the learning really hard. They can’t read the information or understand what you’re saying probably because the noise is too much in the classroom. They’re not able to write what is required.”
Asking questions like, ‘What would be a fun thing to write?’ Then doing it together, role playing and making it fun will help them find their achievable level.
Article supplied with thanks to Sonshine.
Feature image: Canva
