Katie is a bright child. She has been quick to hit milestones, regularly soaring beyond her adoring parents’ eager expectations for developmental learning. But she has not excelled in kindergarten.
“Katie is reading above grade level, but her performance at school makes her teachers think she is an average student,” says mother Melissa.
When presented with daily kids project options, Katie tends to do the bare minimum, choosing tasks that Melissa knows she finds excruciatingly boring. “She gravitates toward worksheets along the lines of, ‘Circle the green frog,’” Melissa says. “When I was in school and someone told me to do a worksheet that was too easy, I would have done 50 of them with a take-that attitude.”
Beyond refusing to rise to the challenge of creative critical thinking, Katie is constantly asking teachers what her mother calls silly questions. “She says, ‘What should I do next?’ when she knows perfectly well what to do,” Melissa says.
She does that at home, too, much to her mother’s chagrin. Even though Katie is fully capable of picking out her own clothes and getting dressed, she wants Mom’s help, playing the sympathy card with great success whenever Melissa initially refuses to indulge her.
And then there are the extracurricular activities. In ballet class, Katie will stand at the barre and watch the rest of the class prance around until the final few minutes, when she takes the floor and executes the day’s lesson perfectly. Before that, things did not go swimmingly at the pool, when Katie flat-out refused to participate during lessons. “She kept complaining that they weren’t teaching her the right way to swim,” says Melissa, who notes that while Katie was being asked to simply put her face in the water and blow bubbles, the little girl was watching adults in the lap lanes. “I think Katie saw advanced swimmers doing the breaststroke and was frustrated that her lesson only involved a small step. She wanted to learn the whole thing right out of the gate!”
Although Melissa is quick to confirm that Katie is not rude or difficult in these situations—just quietly stubborn—she is worried that her daughter is heading toward a lifetime of giving up when things get challenging.
Says Melissa, “I need to figure out how to encourage my smart little girl to use her noggin all the time—not just when she wants to.”
Real Advice
How should adults approach clever, willful children such as Katie? Start asked an educator who heads a parenting workshop called “Helping Children Become Independent Problem-Solvers.”
Christine Boisvert, preschool consultant for Oakland (Michigan) Schools.
The first thing we need to decide is whether an issue is a child-sized problem or an adult problem. It sounds to me like the school situation is one to be addressed by the teachers and parents, not Katie herself. A child cannot be held responsible for choosing easy tasks over challenging ones. Maybe Katie hasn’t tried other activities because she’s afraid she’s going to fail. Maybe she doesn’t want to disappoint her teachers or her parents. Whatever emotions are behind the choices she’s making, Katie needs help figuring out a new approach. She needs assurance that her teachers will guide her if she has trouble with an activity and that her parents will be proud of her effort—even when it’s not stellar.
Now, when it comes to child-sized issues, there are several strategies Katie’s parents can take to support independent problem-solving. Instead of letting her daughter give up, Melissa can acknowledge that a problem is tricky and show her the steps for solving it. Let’s say Katie won’t zip her jacket. Melissa may be in a hurry to leave the house and would find it easier to just do it for her. But then Katie hasn’t learned anything. First the coat is unzipped and then—in the blink of an eye—it’s zipped. It went by so quickly that Katie didn’t see the manageable steps, so she won’t be able to do it herself next time.
Instead, Melissa could talk Katie through the process, teaching her that every solution has multiple steps. With zippers, first you need to put it in, then you need to pull it up. After that, when Katie says, “I can’t,” Melissa can offer to help by assisting, not doing. She should say, “What part of the job do you want me to do, and what part are you going to do?” Pretty soon, Katie will do the whole thing herself without comment.
When Katie asks those so-called silly questions, she might honestly need an answer. Our children’s working memory isn’t the same as ours. It’s highly correlated to motivation. So let’s say it’s cleanup time, and Katie has been told she has to put her toys away. If she asks her mother, “Where does this doll go?” she truly might not remember because she probably doesn’t really want to clean up. To combat this, parents can take a cue from good classrooms and put word-and-picture labels on everything, which helps kids make connections without constant hand-holding.
As for Katie’s willfulness, her parents should keep in mind that—although it can be frustrating now—this is a desired quality in adulthood, only by then we call it
persistence. We can’t let our children do whatever they want, but we should support their willfulness whenever possible. Down the road, this is the very quality that will help Katie succeed.
Rebecca Kavanagh is a contributing editor for EduGuide.