If your child is gifted yet underachieving, find out if their school has testing and counseling options for gifted children. Johns Hopkins University offers programs for local schools to help identify these children. Contact school counselors to discuss the availability of counseling, special testing, and programs to get your child back on track.
Local resources can help your child improve homework and study skills, as well as broaden their horizons to re-motivate them to learn. Tutoring often is the answer if your teen simply does not know how to budget his or her time for studying. Peer tutoring is also an option. This entails having a teen a year or two ahead in school helping your teen learn how to study and prepare for tests. Some teens respond better to peer tutoring than adult tutoring, and by removing the parents from the study equation, you can remove the emotional and psychological barriers that may have built up over the years as you have become more frustrated with your child's performance.
Parents should also consider testing for learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as vision and hearing issues, to make sure these are not the root cause of your teen's underachievement.
Many gift underachievers are inappropriately placed in special education classes. Such teenagers are usually already bored by the curriculum, and the pacing of special education classes may exacerbate this problem.
If your teen has fallen in with a peer group that encourages their continued underachievement, sometimes the answer is to remove them from the immediate environment. Boarding schools that specialize in underachieving teens can be an effective solution in these cases.