In the book The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child, author Richard Lavoie spells out six motivational strategies for getting kids motivated and excited about achieving success.  Lavoie has been a special-educator for more than 30 years, and through his experience in this field he has come to realize that kids that do not succeed are not lazy, as many teachers sometimes label them.  Instead, kids that struggle in school and in other endeavors are likely suffering from what he calls “learned helplessness”.

Learned helplessness is manifested when a child faces failure several times and begins to feel that he is not going to succeed, and therefore does not invest himself, creating a situation of self-fulfilling prophecy.  According to Lavoie, every child finds this type of motivational barrier at some point, and how teachers and parents react influences the potential success of the child.  Blaming the child is definitely the wrong response.  Other commonly used motivational techniques can be just as ineffective.  For example, competition will not motivate a child going through this problem:

“The reality is the only person motivated by competition is the person who thinks he has a chance of winning.”

Rewards are also ineffective in this case because a reward system is based on the assumption that the child can do it but chooses not to.  Punishment is not only ineffective, it can teach children to manipulate others by withholding what they want.  According to Lavoie, this type of behavior results in poor human relations that can lead to problems later in life such as breakups in marriage.

As children start facing more challenges in life, teachers and parents need to become more skilled at motivating and must take responsibility for the child’s success.

“I had a teacher say to me one time, ‘I taught it to him, but he didn’t learn it.’  I said, ‘That is like a salesman saying to his boss, I sold it to him, but he didn’t buy it.”

So how exactly should teachers and parents motivate young people?  Here are the “Six P’s” of the motivational strategy taught in The Motivational Breakthrough:

Praise – Praise should be sincere and focused on effort and improvement.  Saying ‘good job’ when the child shows a mediocre level of effort or performance sends the wrong message.

Power – Empowering children to make choices gives them a sense of autonomy that can help motivate power-driven and aggressive children.

Projects – Projects are wonderful tools for connecting disciplines and is a great way to motivate inquisitive children.

People – Establishing a positive relationship with children is the basis for building an effective motivational process.

Prizes – Prizes can appeal to children motivated by status, recognition, affiliation or power.  Unlike rewards systems that emphasize a conditional reward to entice a behavior, prizes should be intermittent rewards not announced ahead of time to celebrate best efforts.

Prestige – Prestige and recognition is fundamental for autonomous, aggressive and status-driven children.  Giving them an opportunity to showcase their talent is a great motivational strategy.

Getting children turned on at an early age is paramount to their development and key to unleashing their potential for achieving success.