Why high educational standards shouldn't stress out your kids

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Now, some people worry their children will be stressed out if education is stressed too much. My view is quite the opposite. The worst way to stress your child is to allow them to grow up to be incompetent and that's what a bad education would do. So the best way to avoid stress is to make them confident to deal with the real world, which means learning. Learning, learning and learning, including learning to use their judgement. Including learning to read and write and do mathematics. Now, you don't have to put unfair pressure on them but I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to have high expectations, If a child does badly, such as get a spelling test and misses 8 out of 13, which is common. You could say, "Okay, no problem, let's see how much we can improve, by three days from now, let's practice so you can improve." Let a child compete with himself to constantly get better, regardless of what the other kids are doing. Let him strive for learning more and more; and better and better. Don't get them trying to beat somebody else unless it's a game like soccer where that is the goal. But in education, the goal is to learn for yourself and your life. So it's not going to stress them out to have high standards and encouraged improvement, and encourage them to compete with their own goals as opposed to someone else's. So the worst stress is let your child come out of school ignorant. Then they won;t be able to deal with life.

Video Categories: ALL PARENTS, Parenting, Motivation and Praise, ELEMENTARY, Elementary Education, Academic Pressure, TEEN, Education, Academic Pressure

Learn about: Why high educational standards shouldn't stress out your kids from Edwin A. Locke, PhD,...

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Expert Bio

Edwin A. Locke, PhD

Psychologist & Author

Edwin A. Locke, PhD, is Dean's Professor (Emeritus) of Leadership and Motivation at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his BA from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD in Industrial Psychology from Cornell University in 1964.He has published over 300 chapters, notes and articles in professional journals, on such subjects as work motivation, job satisfaction, incentives, and the philosophy of science. He is also the author or editor of 12 books, including The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, Study Methods and Study Motivation, Goal Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works, A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance, Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior, The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators and Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative. He is internationally known for his research on goal setting. A recent survey found that Locke's goal setting theory (developed with G. Latham) was ranked #1 in importance among 73 management theories. His work has been supported by numerous research grants, and he has served as consultant to research firms and private businesses.Dr. Locke has been elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Management, and has been a consulting editor for leading journals. He was a winner of the Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award at the University of Maryland, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Career Contribution Award from the Academy of Management (Human Resource Division), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (Organizational Behavior Division), and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He has been a writer and lecturer for the Ayn Rand Institute and is interested in the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to behavioral sciences.