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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