It’s a brand-new year, packed with promise and possibility. What better day than January 1 to help kids set some intentional goals to supercharge their learning over the next 12 months?
The importance of setting goals
Learning to set goals is a skill all its own. Scholars, a Canadian curriculum development and online tutoring program, in an article titled, “The Benefits of Goal Setting for Kids,” notes that “Goal setting is one of the best ways to increase your child’s classroom motivation and performance.”
It continues: “Learning to set practical goals will not only help your child at their current learning level, but it will also provide them with a skill they can carry throughout their educational careers and beyond, extending into their work and home lives.”
Similarly, Edmentum’s “Six Parent Tips on Goal Setting with Your Child” asks “Why start goal setting with your child?” It then answers with “There are many benefits to doing so early: it can help teach the value of working hard toward a goal in the future and delaying gratification until getting there. Setting goals also teaches children the value of responsibility and time management. With pursuing a goal, children grow in perseverance and develop grit. Lastly, goal setting gives a child greater self-confidence; with every accomplished goal, your child will grow with a sense of accomplishment and have greater confidence in his or her abilities.”
10 steps for setting and achieving goals
We, as adults, know that setting and achieving goals is not like waving a magic wand. Making them happen is a process.
Though resolutions and goals are a bit different, a Cincinnati Children’s Hospital post titled, “8 Steps to Help Kids Make New Year’s Resolutions,” offers an excellent, easy to remember tip: “In order to be successful, goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.” While they use an example involving soccer, a comparable academic goal would be this: instead of a non-SMART goal or “I want to be a better reader,” a SMART goal might be “I will spend 20 minutes a day, 4 days a week for the next 6 months reading,” and “I will learn and practice one new vocabulary word every day.”
Here are 9 other steps, along with “break it down,” to help your child set and follow through on goals:
• Ask your child what they think they did well during the first part of the school year and what they think they could do better. Talk it through. What do they feel is a struggle or challenge. Be sure to acknowledge and praise the positives you have seen and your confidence in their ability to improve.
• Together, discuss what a “big goal” is. Write it down. Do better in math? Spelling? Getting homework done and turned in on time?
• Talk about why this goal is important. What are the benefits? How can it help your child?
• Break down the big goal into smaller, more specific “SMART” steps or pieces. This will both help ensure success now and prepare them for making seemingly impossible goals later on seem more doable.
• Though goals need to be achievable and realistic, they should also include a measure of challenge—something that feels a little bit out of reach. Meeting challenges is part of what produces a sense of accomplishment. In turn, that builds confidence in setting future goals.
• When possible, try and connect goals with interests. Maybe your child has a hard time reading but is really interested in airplanes. Visit the library and take out a book each week for six weeks about planes.
• Brainstorm possible obstacles or challenges to meeting the goals they set. Talk about how they might deal with those obstacles. For example, if they simply don’t like practicing math facts, work out a reward system, (And revisit #3: why is it important.)
• Let your child own their goals. Help them put them in a visual form that they can easily track and refer to often.
• Offer encouragement and reward progress and accomplishment. We all know that setting a goal and seeing it through are very different things. Seeing and rewarding progress helps sustain motivation. Some rewards might be pre-planned and agreed on; others might be surprises.
• Build in checkpoints. Reminders on phones? Sticker charts or calendars? It’s pretty common to encounter setbacks. Help your child reflect on how things are going and revise if needed.
Share your own goals
As with so many things about parenting, keeping it real with kids can go a really long way to convincing them you know what you’re talking about. Discuss with kids some of your own experiences and goals, past and present. Were you a state-level athlete in high school? Did you go from struggling in a subject to getting a B? Did you start off as fifth chair trumpet player in marching band and move up to first? How about the job you have now? What did getting it involve? What steps did you take?
Kids naturally tend to imagine that what they see is how it’s always been. For example, if your family has a comfortable lifestyle, they can’t see the “before” when mom or dad were living on mac and cheese in college. (And of course, a steady diet of mac and cheese might sound fabulous to them!)
At this time of year, it can be easy to confuse resolutions and goals. A company called Servicemaster by Stratos, serving customers in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, in “Goals and Resolutions: What’s the Difference?” distinguishes them this way: “A resolution is a statement of what you want to change. For example, saving money. A goal is a statement of what you want to achieve; the steps you need to take to achieve it; and when you want to achieve it by. For example, saving 10 percent of each paycheck for the next six months, so you can take a family vacation in August.”
You can bet that would be a goal that gets kids’ attention! But even sharing a goal of exercising 30 minutes a day or eating a sit-down, phone-free dinner as a family 4 nights a week, and holding yourself accountable to your part of it, shows kids that goal-setting is for everyone on an ongoing basis.
It shows team solidarity: Let’s. Do. This!
