If nothing really matters, then why should I care? The emotional challenge for your children.

By General Education Advice

The Learning Consultants has been helping children deal with their emotional well being for many years.

Early on, I wrote that our mission was “to help children reach their potential.”  I left out “academic” potential purposely.  I would elaborate that I wanted to help our children-clients reach their human potential.  If pressed further, I would note that we cared about the emotional/psychological well-being of our clients as much (or more) that their academic success.

It seems that The Learning Consultants blossomed as we grew through Connecticut because our tutors – Jean Card and Jesse Brockwell – as two well known examples helped our children clients feel better about themselves while also doing better in school.  The dual themes of “happy and successful” have been a consistent part of my work.

Our differentiation in the 2000s and most of the 2010s was working in our Student Mastery (my main program) and Academic Therapy (Jean’s program) both of which provided holistic (emotional/motivation) tutoring/coaching/academic counseling as opposed to simply tutoring for better grades.

We did so because there may have been too much focus on external achievement alone.

But… .we still cared very much about results.  In other words, we didn’t help children “feel good” while getting bad grades.  We helped children feel good by motivating them to care about their work for their own sake.  Essentially, we had that now almost old-fashioned view of getting them to try their best and view that as a victory as much as the A.  The truth, as we all inherently know, is that the A does feel good and that success also leads to happiness.

Doing well leads to feeling good.

Of late, the fashionableness of saying “who cares?” has grown among PARENTS.  In an effort to lower stress for their children (great!), many have lowered standards so much that their children do not really care about…. anything.

The problem – in addition nihilism – is their children flounder.  It doesn’t feel good (the supposed goal of lowering stress) to underperform.

We have been preaching “HAPPINESS and success” for years because of what may have been the out of balance tilt towards the right side of that statement.  Now it seems that we need to emphasize the connection: Happiness AND Success.