Whenever I ask a big boss about the most pressing problems in his company, he always talks about problems with motivation. When I have a chance to talk to parents of teenage children, they always say the same thing: «He (she) lacks the motivation to study (or work, or any other activity).»
Motivation is one of the most unusual animals living in the zoo of the human psyche. The more you pull her out of the hole where she sits, the deeper she hides. Sometimes when you try to control a situation, it disappears altogether. I imagine a mother running around the museum of natural history, as if trying to convey her interest in giant dinosaurs to her teenage children, who walk around the museum looking bored, occasionally taking pictures with their phones.
Although motivation cannot be forced, several factors contribute to its emergence, helping children progress from the stage of lack of motivation (“I don’t want, I won’t”) to the stage of external motivation (“I will only do it because I am forced to”), then to introjected motivation (“ I’m ashamed that I don’t»), followed by integrated motivation («I understand why I need it») and, finally, true motivation («I like to do it»). There are three main factors contributing to motivation − desire for competence, need for connection with others, and personal choice.
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Commitment to Competence
This is openness and interest in new things, the search for opportunities for learning and acquiring new skills. The desire for competence is already noticeable in infants — they play, learn to interact with objects around them and explore the world around them. When a child takes the first steps, falls and gets up again — this is the desire for competence. We all want to be competent, to be able to do something well, and this desire does not disappear with age, but often becomes more narrowly focused — for example, we really want to achieve mastery in football or makeup, but study does not interest us. Take a closer look at your teenager — in what area does he want to become competent? Is it possible to redirect his passion somewhere else? Maybe it makes sense to Google information about the chemical composition of lipstick, if it will help to interest her daughter in science? It is also worth remembering that, for example, it can be difficult for a 12-year-old to read an entire chapter of a textbook. You can divide it into subsections, breaking one large goal into several small ones. With each read subsection, competence will gradually grow.
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Connection with others
It’s about our deep need to build relationships and be together with other people. As one of the founders of positive psychology, Chris Peterson, said, “Others matter to us.” To satisfy this need, you need to build reliable relationships and feel like a full member of society. Young children tend to build relationships with family members, but teenagers are much more likely to reach out to peers. This can also be used to increase their motivation: invite a friend of your child to a family picnic, invite a group of his friends to work on a project together, or enroll your son or daughter in a circle or class where their new comrades are likely to “endorse” some activities that your child was not previously interested in. My 16-year-old Andrew has a theater class every Saturday. For the past three years, museums have seemed to him not “cool” enough, but recently he has suddenly taken up his cultural horizons — simply because the girl from this circle, whom he likes, is interested in art.
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Personal choice
This means that we act according to our own decision (and not because of external factors), and also coordinate our actions with our value system. Personal choice is essential to motivation. If we are free to choose what we do, it is easier for us to appreciate the reasons why we make these choices. On the contrary, if we do something against our will, it is much more difficult to develop intrinsic motivation. Therefore, additional rewards for achievement, for which a person must have his own motivation, actually only worsen his results. So forget about promising a teenager a new smartphone for a good exam grade, and, as scary as it sounds, shift the responsibility for his life to him. When they understand that this is a real responsibility (“I will not choose for you where you go”), then most likely they will be ready for it.
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Research shows us what happens when these three factors are not addressed. It was found that the children of controlling parents like to play less than the children of parents who develop independence in the child. It seems that parental control spoils the child’s enjoyment of the most natural activity for him. As a result, the dissatisfaction of basic needs (due to cold, controlling parents) leads to the search for external substitutes. For example, teenagers whose mothers were rated as cold and uncaring were more interested in material needs (money and things) as compensation.
By the way, we can learn a lot about how to motivate teenagers from the Angry Birds game. Those features of games that keep your child sitting for hours on a smartphone or in front of a game console can also be used to achieve academic success. Many small tasks, progressive difficulty, constant feedback (growing competence), interesting story (personal choice), the opportunity to compete with friends (connect with others) — this is the recipe for the strongest motivation.