Why should I do my homework if I'm learning the material?

I hear it often from bright, but unmotivated students: "what's the point of doing homework if I'm able to learn the material without it?" As a parent, you may be stumped to find a good answer to your child's question, even as you know in your 'gut' that there's something fundamentally wrong with this picture. For most students, doing homework is a way to reinforce the classroom content and textbook material. And some subjects such as math and higher level science courses, really go better when supported by regularly completed homework assignments even when the student is bright.

Beyond the benefit of better grades when homework is completed, I believe that a potentially even greater outcome is derived from regular homework completion. And that is this: every job imaginable that your child may do in the future, will contain some duties which are mundane, boring and tedious. Learning now to develop the capacity to endure and complete the mundane and tedious tasks in his/her life, will prepare your child to better manage the tedious, boring tasks involved in any future career.

Conversely, bright but unmotivated students who do the bare minimum to get by now, may be able to get decent enough grades just based upon his/her native intelligence. But they will pay the price later in the form of compromised job reviews largely because of their lack of self discipline to attend to those important little boring details which are part of any job.

If you have a bright but unmotivated student who is doing the minimum to get by, consider a consult with a reputable mental health professional. In the Chicago metropolitan area, consider one of our professional staff at Heritage Professional Associates, with offices in Hinsdale, Wheaton, and downtown Chicago.

Giving it Your Optimal Effort: A Remedy to School Stress and Overachievement

"Do your best" or "give it your best effort" are phrases most of have heard for the majority of our lives.  And, there is something to be said for applying ourselves in a sustained, disciplined way over time. As a psychologist, I have seen way too many students who are giving their best efforts toward school. And while they have phenomenal grades and get into good colleges, their maximum effort comes at a price. Signs of unhealthy levels of effort include:

• trouble falling asleep at night because your mind won't shut off
• going past your normal bedtime routinely by an hour or more in order to get school work completed
• spending way more time on schoolwork than most of your peers 
• persistent feelings of stress, anxiety, worry or depression related to school
• feeling pushed too hard by one's own or by one's parents' expectations
• engaging in little, if any, recreational time
• being unable to tone down your perfectionism

I promote the notion of "give it your optimal effort" when it comes to important activities such as school, sports, music, etc. An optimal effort means that you apply yourself in a sustained, disciplined way to accomplish things. But, the effort is not a maximum one, at least not over time. It allows for balance, moderation, and an emotionally healthy life. Signs of optimal effort include:

• feeling like your life is in balance - there's time for studying, "down time", wandering time with friends, exercise, and creativity
• you don't feel stressed on a daily basis
• you can fall asleep pretty readily at bedtime and you sleep through the night most nights
• you feel encouraged and prompted to do well, but not too pushed by either yourself or your parents 
• your natural ability and your grades seemed to be in balance (that is, there is neither under-achieving or over-achieving going on)

If you're concerned that you might be stuck in a cycle of over-achievement, chronic school stress, and a life out of balance, contact someone you trust for the name of a reputable mental health professional. In the Chicago metropolitan area, consider someone at Heritage Professional Associates, with offices in Hinsdale, Wheaton, and downtown Chicago.

How Can We Respond to Awful Things That Happen in the World?

Fresh in everyone's minds this morning is the massacre of children in Newtown, CT. As our President said yesterday, there have been too many of these tragedies. With media so accessible to us so much of the time, it's hard not to get 'disaster fatigue' when something big and bad happens. Whether it's the mass murder of innocents, or seeing the destruction on a grand scale wrought by Mother Nature, it's the feeling of helplessness in response to something so massive and tragic that creates weariness, and in some, depression.

Soon following a disaster are the many images, personal accounts of tragedy and loss, and with them an unsettling of our sense of security. If it could happen in Newtown, CT, it could happen anywhere. And it has. I still remember the images of Hurricane Sandy, or the Tsunami in Japan, or 9/11 or Chernobyl. The list keeps getting longer.  So what can we do?

Doing something in response to these tragedies is a way of reducing disaster fatigue, weariness and our vulnerability to depression and despair. In response to the Newtown massacre, I sponsored another third world child in need, in memory of the children lost yesterday. When I have lost a loved one, I re-commit to love those in my life a little more, a little better. Spreading love, charity, compassion and mercy in response to disasters, both personally and globally, are ways to react and set in motion a greater good. It's my personal statement of protest to bad things to make the world a little better.

America and Gun Violence

I think a lot about this issue. As the attached post shows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate), the US ranks 12th in the per capita death rate with guns. All of the other countries with higher per capita rates have much smaller populations (exceptions being Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines). Brazil's death-by-gun per capita rate is more than double that in the US, a fact that probably most people in the world would never guess. Yet Brazil's population is approaching 2/3 of the population in the US - no small number.

But the US is a country that's unique in several ways. 'She' manages to put herself and/or find herself in the world's spot light much of the time. When there's something grand going on in the US - science, technology, music, humor, the world knows about it. Probably more is known about the US abroad than is known about a lot of other countries. So, too, will the world know more about America's problems than the problems of other countries (like El Salvador having a murder-by-gun rate that is more than 5 times that of the US; but it has a population of only 6 million to the US's 312 million).

I also look at the comparison of the US to its neighbor to the north. The gun-per-capita rate comparison of the US to Canada is about 2:1. But the murder rate is way lopsided, with the US per capita murder rate exceeding Canada's by a large margin (there are about 4-5 murders in the US per 100,000 of population compared to Canada where the number is about 1 per 100,000). I think that there are some attitude differences that account for this. The average US citizen is more entitled, arrogant, territorial (we simply took a bunch of Canadian land more than a century ago when 'buying' Alaska) and has a culturally ingrained right to self defense borne out of its origins. The massacre and / or mistreatment of the native American Indian population aside, Americans have defined themselves as adversaries or opponents to oppressive governments - hence they left those mother lands for the US over the last few hundred years. And when the mother lands came to the US to take back the land or its people, the right to bear arms was engraved in its constitution. This defiant, defend my land at all costs has taken on absurd proportions. People buy hand guns to defend their 'land' even when that may be an apartment. And the fact that such self defense weapons are used against one's own loved ones more than predators by overwhelming margins, does little to change our country's engrained right to bear arms.

I'm hoping that in the US, a faction as popular and powerful as the National Rifle Association (NRA) will sprout roots and become as influential in American politics as the NRA but in the opposite direction, that of education about gun violence, and making a stance of getting rid of guns from American households. It could become a new American initiative, like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers has done to educate the country to not drink and drive.