How to Create Good Study Habits With Your Child
One of the struggles every child faces is schoolwork. That’s why it’s important to create good study habits from a young age.
In this article, we’ll share some steps to help your child create good study habits. Over time your child will take over their homework responsibilities naturally.
Good study habits: challenge what they can reach
Making sure children complete their schoolwork at home can be a challenge for parents. Trying to encourage children to study responsibly can be difficult.
That’s why it’s important to incorporate certain behaviors in a step-by-step manner, depending on their level of education and age.
For example, according to Eurostat data from 2001, Spain has the highest rate of school dropouts (20%) in Europe. In Spain, one in every 5 children drops out of school.
Among other factors, poor performance and failure in school push many children to drop out.
In their first few years at school, help children find useful tools and techniques to incorporate good study habits. This will help them stay in school.
Creating good study habits is similar to work life. In order to study, they’ll have to plan ahead and organize, concentrate, understand, and follow good habits.
Planning work
The ideal time
It’s important for your child to integrate a daily study routine little by little.
They should start dedicating between 20 to 30 minutes to school tasks. Every so often they should incorporate 10 more minutes.
Time of day
Another relevant factor is finding the best time to sit down and study.
Many professionals advise that study time should begin when your child returns home from school, to take advantage of the momentum from school.
However, depending on the child, it might be better to let them relax and play a little bit first. The key is to respect that time frame each day.
The importance of organization
As your child’s homework load increases, there are certain options they can use to help. You can use online tools to make their use of time more efficient.
Calendars, agendas, and notepads are helpful tools to plan, find and write down information, and tackle other tasks.
Concentration
Children’s environment and surroundings are extremely important when it comes to studying.
Ideally, there should be a space in the home dedicated to school tasks. This will help your child avoid distractions from household activities.
Make sure they have what they need and can work in silence. It’s also important to organize and clean the space regularly.
In addition to avoiding distractions from cell phones, TV, video games, and other games, it’s important to allocate time appropriately.
For restless children, it can be really helpful to spend time exclusively studying and then take a break and rest. This will help them have better results.
Tools for understanding
Depending on their age, it’s important for children to use certain tools to help them adopt effective study habits. These habits will help them in more advanced stages of studying.
First, we can teach them:
- To read comprehensively: Reading isn’t useless if they don’t understand what they read. To create the habit of reading and help their comprehension, at first we can read with our children and ask them questions about the text.
- Underlining and outlining: Both of these techniques are useful for comprehension and studying. Teach them to pick out the main ideas so they can underline them. Guide them to create outlines with keywords. These are both excellent options.
- Use study techniques. Understanding the meaning of texts, identifying main ideas, creating outlines and summaries to visualize their relationships is the perfect way to elaborate on summarizing the basic content. All of these techniques will make studying easier.
In reality, we don’t give enough emphasis to the importance of education. The first few stages of schooling are key for our children to learn how to study.
Always keep in mind that consistency, understanding and daily effort are fundamental aspects to obtain favorable study habits.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Cortese, A. (2011). Técnicas de estudio. Metodología de la investigación.
- Narváez, M. R. T., Guzmán, I. T., González, M. D. C. U., & Robayo, A. M. M. (2009). Hábitos de estudio vs. fracaso académico. Revista educación, 33(2), 15-24. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/440/44012058002.pdf
- Ramos, C. B. (2007). La incidencia de las TICs en el fortalecimiento de hábitos y competencias para el estudio. Edutec. Revista Electrónica de Tecnología Educativa, (23), a077-a077. http://edutec.es/revista/index.php/edutec-e/article/view/497
