The school year is starting and as parents many of us are concerned about the grades that our child will get. I recently wrote a blog about how parents can help their teens in school and the ideas I shared can definitely help. But I just read an article that discussed how a teen’s willpower is the greatest factor in determining their academic success.
Cordelia Fine in her article “Willpower is best used with care” tells about a librarian, Anne, who could predict which students would receive first-class or highest level degrees. She was almost always correct. Her secret – “she knew how often she had seen students in the department library: reading course notes, photocopying journals, borrowing books. And the handful of students who Anne saw a lot – conspicuously more often than the other students in the same year – were going to get a first.” The students who were self-disciplined, not necessarily the most talented or bright, were the ones that achieved academic success.
This idea was recently tested by psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman in a study done with a group of eight graders. Each student’s IQ was tested. Then they, their parents, and teachers filled out a questionnaire that asked questions about self-control. They were asked questions like, “Are you good at resisting temptation? Can you work effectively towards long-term goals? Or do pleasure and fun sometimes keep you from getting work done?”
In the spring the researchers returned and recorded each student’s grades. Then they compared the grades to the IQ scores and how self-controlled each student was. They found that the most important factor in a student’s grades “was self-control, by a long shot. A child’s capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.” Psychologists Duckworth and Seligman concluded, “Programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement.”
So parents what really matters is not how smart your child is but how hard your child works. For in the long run it is willpower and self-discipline that actually get the grade.
Look for a future blog that discusses how you can help your child build self-discipline.