Category: Parenting

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Your kid doesn’t seem to care about school. They don’t do their homework, or they just do the bare minimum. They don’t study for tests, take notes in class, or ask the teacher for help.

They present as disengaged, apathetic, and lazy, saying things like, “I don’t care about school” or “School is pointless.”

They might even have an actively anti-school attitude, saying things like “School is stupid” or “I hate school!”

Their secret?

They do care, they know school is important, and they want to succeed. They just don’t know how, and they’re worried that they’re not capable.

But they’re not trying their best!

Actually, they are. Or at least, you should assume they are. It’s not helpful to accuse a child of being lazy and admonish them to try harder when they’re thinking, “I can’t succeed anyway, so what’s the point?” If you’re playing a game, and it feels like you can’t win, the natural response is to stop caring.

With the tools and the skills they have, they are doing their best. What they need is help.

Not caring is a defense mechanism.

Apathy is a defense mechanism. So, when your kid says, “I don’t care,” what they’re really saying is “I don’t know how to succeed.”

It’s safer to say you don’t care than to ask for help.

It’s easier to disengage than to do the hard work of catching up.

It feels better to say, “School is dumb” than to think “I’m too dumb to do well in school.” (This thought is, of course, wrong. They’re not stupid. School is just hard, and they don’t know that it’s supposed to be hard.)

No one wants to fail. It doesn’t feel good. But failure is especially painful if you care, if you really commit.

It’s emotionally safer to fail at something you supposedly don’t care about. If you don’t try and you fail, then you can always say that you could have succeeded if you’d wanted to. That’s a lot less painful than working really hard and failing anyway.

The problem of self-perception.

The trouble with acting like you don’t care is that, eventually, apathy starts to take root. This is because of self-perception, the phenomenon in which your brain decides how to feel by observing how you behave.

So, if you act like you don’t care long enough, you might really start believing that you don’t care. If you disengage from school for too long, being the kid who doesn’t care starts to become your identity.

Not only are you in a downward spiral of avoidance with respect to your schoolwork, you’re in a downward spiral of disengagement:

The solution?

Give them the tools of success, because, as Dr. Ross Greene says, “Kids do well when they can.”¹

Here are some things you can do that will help your child feel like success is within reach:

• Make sure they have all of the school supplies, resources, and executive function tools they might need
• Create a dedicated, tidy, well-stocked home study space
• Let them know that you’re available to help or offer guidance anytime they want
• Give them the option of using tutors as much as they need
• Remind them that there are strategies that make learning and productivity easier – that it’s not all about intelligence or brute-force willpower

They might not take advantage of everything you offer, but at least you’ve made these things available. And make sure to actively model using the tools and strategies of success yourself. Model continuous learning, demonstrating that you’re not “done” even though you’re not in school.

Be supportive without overparenting or micromanaging. If you do too much for them, the message they’ll hear is that they’re not capable of doing it on their own. Remember, we’re trying to increase their self-efficacy.

A student who presents as apathetic might question the value of a particular subject or school in general, so you should have good answers for the question, “What’s the point of school?” But the most effective way to increase their drive is get them moving forward because progress is the best form of motivation.

A student who’s using apathy as a defense mechanism doesn’t feel smart and has a fixed mindset, so you should use growth mindset language, such as talking about exercising your brain muscles. But the most powerful shifts in mindset come from experiencing success via effort and strategy.

You don’t get them to care. You help them succeed. And when they start to see that success is possible for them, it will become safe to show that they care. Then they’ll start to act like they care, reversing the downward spiral of disengagement.

Related Reading: How to Get Students to Care About Their Grades

Want more parenting ideas? Check out our Parenting for Academic Success classes!

¹ Kraft, Houston. Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness. S&S/Simon Element, 2020.

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Reading Time: 6 minutes

One of the core messages of our parenting classes is patience. Effective parenting is patient parenting.

Now, it’s natural to hope for a quick fix, to look for a shortcut. And I wish there was something I could teach you that would create the kind of instantaneous, dramatic change you’re looking for – some magic words you could say to your child tonight that would produce the outcomes you want tomorrow.

But that’s not how parenting works. That’s not how life works.

So instead, we teach parents how to play “the long game.” It’s a tough sell because the short game is tempting. It seems like there should just be a way to “fix” the problems you have with your kids – their behavior, their grades, their attitude. But people aren’t robots who can be fixed. They’re human beings who can grow.

So the short game is a lie. The only thing that really works is patiently helping your kids grow. The long game is the only game.

Problems With Short-Game Parenting

“Immediate and visible benefits seduce you into the short game. You win today but lose tomorrow.” –Shane Parrish¹

Playing the short game is like maxing out your credit cards to get what you want today. The immediate results feel better, but the long-term consequences are terrible.

The short-game parenting might produce the results you want for a while:

• You don’t want your kid to fail, so you rescue them.
• You want them to stay on top of their homework, so you micromanage.
• You want the house to be clean, so you do all the chores yourself since you know how to do them properly.

But there’s a serious cost to this approach. The immediate results come at the expense of long-term benefits. Overparenting stifles your child’s growth:

• Rescuing them from failure prevents them from experiencing the natural consequences that would motivate them to work harder.
• Micromanaging prevents them from developing the executive function skills they need to succeed on their own.
• Doing all of the chores yourself is not only unfair to you, it also deprives your kid of all of the benefits of chores.

When you play the long game and parent patiently, the benefits won’t immediately show up in obvious ways. So it’s tempting to intervene and force the change you want to see right now, but this always backfires, making the problem worse in the long run.

The only way to create lasting change is by playing the long game, so let’s break down what that really means.

Short-Game Parenting vs. Long-Game Parenting

“We play the short game because we lack patience. Everyone wants to win, but there is a difference between trying to win the moment and trying to win the decade.” –Shane Parrish¹

Long-game parenting means leading by example rather than making your kids do things a certain way. It means asking guiding questions rather than telling them what to do. It means letting them try things on their own rather than doing everything for them.

Playing the long game means creating an environment where intrinsic motivation can grow on its own rather than motivating with rewards and punishments. It means giving your kids the opportunity to remember their responsibilities on their own rather than reminding and nagging them.

Long-game parenting means letting your kids make choices about what to do, how to do it, and when to do it rather than micromanaging their lives. It means letting them fail – early and often – rather than rescuing them because failure is a great teacher.

Playing the long game means focusing on building trust and strengthening your relationship with your kids. It means asking for permission before giving advice and making it okay if the answer is “no.” It means gently reframing the things they say with more helpful language rather than telling them they’re wrong.

Changing Your Approach

“The longer you play the short game, the harder things get.” –Shane Parrish¹

There is perhaps nothing parents find harder than making the shift from short-game parenting to long-game parenting.

For starters, any behavioral change is difficult. But adopting the practices of patient parenting is particularly emotional.

When you stop micromanaging, your kid’s performance will almost certainly dip. They’ll start doing worse at school. They’ll forget or neglect their responsibilities. It is very difficult to stand by and watch this happen, biting your tongue instead of jumping in to fix things.

They might lose privileges as a result of their poor choices. They’ll probably get upset. They might suffer the pain of a significant failure. But this short-term pain should only be short-term. After the training wheels come off, they’ll crash, but then they’ll learn how to ride on their own. They’ll figure it out because they’re being forced to adapt.

And remember, you’re not doing nothing. The alternative to helicopter parenting isn’t neglect. It’s providing the scaffolding for success. It’s designing a home environment where good choices are easier. It’s actively modeling how to be productive, how to be strategic, how to be curious, and how to be resourceful. These actions won’t produce big, immediate results, but they will help, accruing and compounding like a retirement account.

“The first step in the long game is the hardest. You have to be willing to suffer a little today in order to make tomorrow just a little bit easier. And you have to be smart enough to know that just because you can’t see the tiny advantage you created doesn’t mean it’s not there.” –Shane Parrish¹

Modeling the Long Game

Parenting isn’t the only place where the long game is the only game. This holds true for nearly everything in life. So one of the most valuable things you can model for your kids is playing the long game for yourself.

Kids are just as tempted by the short game as adults, if not more so due to their underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. Delayed gratification and long-term thinking don’t come easily to young brains. So they need your help learning to play the long game. Not the kind of help where you tell them what to do, but the kind of help where you show them how to live by the way you live.

Kids need to see lots of examples of adults playing the long game. Not just adults making wise choices about the future, but adults modeling the use of strategies to make it easier to play the long game. Committing to one new healthy habit at a time. Starting small and gradually expanding that habit. Not only is this a good thing to model for your kids, it’s the only sustainable way to change your behavior. If you want to lose weight, cultivate mindfulness, or grow your career, you have to think long term.

For example, I have a habit of doing daily push-ups. As of this writing, I’m doing 44 push-ups per day. I started this habit 44 months ago, doing just one push-up per day. Each month, I’ve added one push-up per day. The success of this approach came from thinking in terms of years and decades rather than weeks and months. If you can approach self-improvement with that level of patience, you can do truly astonishing things.

Kids also need to see adults modeling the mindsets of the long game. Having a growth mindset. Giving yourself permission to be a beginner, to struggle, and to fail (but then troubleshoot and recommit). Giving yourself permission to be human and being kind to yourself. Practicing self-care rather than overworking to the point of burnout. Ditching perfectionism and embracing the philosophy that everything counts.

You can’t teach these attitudes directly (if you try, it won’t stick), but you can instill them in your kids through your example. When they see you embody the long game in your life, they’ll unconsciously learn to play the long game in their own lives.

And there’s one more benefit to playing the long game in your personal life: practicing patience. The patience you need to play the long game with your kids is the very same patience you need to play the long game with yourself.

Your physical and mental health. Your finances. Your habits. Your progress. Your relationships.

For all of these things, accept that the long game is the only game and commit to playing it for the rest of your life.

¹Parrish, Shane. “The Surprising Power of The Long Game.” Farnam Street.

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