What’s more valuable: tutoring or parent coaching?
Meeting once or twice a week with an excellent tutor can be wonderfully beneficial for a child. Tutors are skilled at meeting students’ specific academic needs, encouraging their progress, and growing their confidence. Plus, many students (teenagers in particular) are more likely to listen to a tutor than a parent. As such, it’s often easier for a tutor to influence an adolescent’s behavior than it is for a parent.
On the other hand, parents get far more than an hour or two per week with their children, so parents have far more opportunities to influence their children. And although a teenager is often like a Chinese finger-trap, resisting whatever well-meaning advice parents give, teenagers are deeply influenced by their parents.
Parents can adjust the physical environment of the home, creating easy-to-use study spaces and making healthy choices the norm. Parents can use growth-minded language and ask proactive questions. Parents can model making wise choices, being resilient when faced with challenges, and using smart strategies to overcome problems. Parents can actively demonstrate curiosity, passion, and grit.
And parents get thousands of little opportunities to do these things each week. With some coaching, you can take these frequently missed opportunities and transform them into fuel for your child’s growth.
So, bang for your buck, parent coaching is more valuable than tutoring. (You can, of course, do both.)
One way to improve your approach to parenting is through personalized coaching. These sessions, offered by Northwest Educational Services owner Greg Smith, are not about telling you how to raise your kids. They’re about troubleshooting the challenges you’re experiencing as parents with strategies derived from decades of working with children. They’re also not about judging you. Parenting is hard, and no one does it perfectly. If you’re interested in parent coaching, email greg@nwtutoring.com.
Another option is to take our Parenting For Academic Success classes. These classes are co-taught by Greg and me, combining Greg’s wisdom with what psychology and neuroscience have to say about helping adolescents learn and grow. Our three classes are perennially available as videos that you can watch at your own pace. To learn more, click here.
Chris Loper has been working as a tutor and academic coach since 2014, racking up over 13,000 hours of experience supporting students.
Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the co-creator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families.
Chris writes the popular self-improvement blog Becoming Better, where he also offers habit coaching, helping busy adults with habit formation and productivity.
Chris’s most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more.
In 2021, he published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons.
He lives in Issaquah, WA, where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.