What to Do
Show respect for your child's individuality
Set small, attainable goals at first
Motivate your teen by finding creative ways to approach academics
Give positive feedback for performance and constructive criticism to help motivate them further
Create positive opportunities to improve achievement by being spontaneous and creative
Find ways to stimulate a gifted but bored child
Have siblings cooperate in supporting each other in studying and doing homework
Find what interests your child and work from there
Allow the child to investigate and discover their interests
Motivat
What NOT to Do
Put your child down and try to shame them into achievement
Set high, lofty goals that are overwhelming to the teen
Threaten your child and try to bully them into achievement
Act unresponsive and uncaring when they perform because "they are supposed to do well," then cut them down when they get off track
Set rigid, arbitrary rules and create an authoritarian atmosphere to force your child to comply
Allow a gifted child to languish in classes intended for children with emotional problems
Set siblings against each other in a competition to be better than one another
Cajole and push your child to be interested in what you think they should be interested in
Insist they do well at specific subjects to "get anywhere" or compete with other students
Nag
You think math and science are the route to success. Your child seems to have a particular interest in history or English. Your child is struggling in school and not achieving at his or her level of ability. Rather than insist your child develop an interest in math or science, the first step in increasing performance is to focus on the subjects they enjoy. As their performance increases in those subjects, the positive feedback they receive can lead to better performance in the subjects they don't really like. It's important that you not try to pre-determine your child's academic future. You can fit a square peg in a round hole if you have a big enough sledge hammer and don't care about how battered the square peg is by the time you jam it into the round hole. But this certainly isn't the most effective method. It would be better to find the right square hole to put that square peg in!