‘90s FAMILY : Parents Are as Hungry for Good Grades as Their Kids

As a child, Darla Longo got $1 for every A on her report card--a strategy she said was pretty effective as a perk for good performance.

But she hasn’t started using rewards with her children. In fact, when her 9-year-old daughter recently began having trouble in math, Longo didn’t offer incentives for better grades. Instead, she recruited her mother-in-law to help with her daughter’s homework.

“I don’t think that using rewards is necessarily bad,” said Longo, a senior vice president with Coldwell Banker in Los Angeles whose work schedule gets her home to La Canada Flintridge no earlier than 7 p.m. “It was just more that as a working mom, I couldn’t be home to help with homework.”

A recent study lends support to Longo’s strategy. Although it’s very common for parents to use rewards such as money or toys, those rewards may actually work against a child’s long-range success at school, said Adele Gottfried, professor of educational psychology and counseling at Cal State Northridge.

In a survey of 107 9- and 10-year-olds, Gottfried and her co-researchers found that students whose parents rewarded good grades with toys or money didn’t do as well academically as those whose parents simply encouraged the child’s interest in school or took time to provide help with school work.

“When kids get rewards for their achievement, they’re being trained to expect something else rather than the achievements themselves,” Gottfried said. “What happens when the rewards run out? Where’s the motivation?”

A better approach, she said, is for the parent to take an interest in what stimulates a child at school and fuel the passion with trips to the library, to museums or general conversation about the school subject.

Gottfried’s study is part of growing research among psychologists and educational researchers suggesting that parents’ behavior can greatly impact a child’s school success.

Joyce Epstein, co-director of the Center on Family, Communities, Schools and Children’s Learning at Johns Hopkins University, said most parents are eager to encourage their children’s school success--but don’t know how to do it.

According to her center’s surveys, about 20% to 25% of parents know how to help their children do well in school, but about 70% to 75% say they would do more if they knew what to do.

“The bad press on parents has been much inflated,” Epstein said. “Parents are desperate for information and assistance--not to make them better parents, but to enable them to do what they want to do.”

What are some of those strategies?

For one thing, Epstein said, parents shouldn’t think that helping their child with schoolwork means being an all-knowing teacher. Instead of waiting for the child to ask for help on homework, parents should ask to see some part of the homework anyway--especially if it’s something the child already understands.

“It should be the child in the role of teacher and demonstrator, and the parent in the role of listener, reactor and motivator,” Epstein said. Ideally, she added, schools should assign interactive homework, which would require the student to involve parents by discussing a topic, interviewing a family member or writing something the parents can read.

Epstein and others also suggest these strategies for parents to consider:

* Volunteer in the classroom or at the school.

* Join the school’s parent association.

* Expect regular communication about the child’s progress.

* Help the child set aside regular time to do homework.

* Encourage the child to be persistent with difficult work.

Rex Forehand, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, said parents who work out their own problems may also be helping their children do well at school.

“Problems that go on in the home do affect performance in school,” said Forehand, who is studying the impact of divorce on school performance.

Sometimes problems may even start with poor parenting skills in preschool years, Forehand added. One common example, he said, is when a parent doesn’t firmly, but calmly, deal with a young child’s penchant for ignoring instructions.

“A parent will ask a child to clean up toys, let’s say, and the child throws a tantrum,” Forehand said. “When he does, the parent may withdraw the command. The child learns that if he really throws a fit, he can get what he wants.

But the matter worsens, he said, when the parent eventually cracks down on the child, becoming tough and often nasty. The child may comply at first, causing the parent to take a tougher stance with every request. But the strategy often spirals into a vicious cycle, with the child learning louder ways to protest and the adults becoming even nastier.

“Kids take those interactions styles with parents and use them with teachers and peers,” often with poor results, Forehand added.