How far should I push?

This is not a question we were asking back then!

This is a question you ask yourself many times as a parent. We sat down and asked ourselves this seriously again the other night.

Situation? 12 y.o. son decided to take up the PTA summer vacation challenge of memorising 1 John. Actually, I wrote about it back here. If he completes the challenge, he will be rewarded by the PTA with 10,000 yen (something slightly more than AU$100). We know he can do it. He has an impressive memory (when he chooses to use it) and he accomplished this task last year, memorising all of 1 Peter, which is a similar length, about 100 verses.

Current status late last week? Our son was lagging behind in meeting the goals he so keenly set a few weeks ago. He was ignoring our kind reminders and, to put it blatantly, just bludging away yet hoping that somehow the goal would be reached. He even seemed a little bit depressed – lacking motivation in most daily things.

How did we get to this point? Early in the holidays I nagged terribly. That didn't work and quite frankly it was ruining my holiday too, so I quit. I restricted myself to a friendly reminder or two at strategic times (like just after lunch when everyone was going to their room for SQUIRT* time). Additionally his goals had been set without the thought that some days would be harder to memorise on than others (like, for example when we had visitors for two weeks and when we went camping).

Instead of nagging, we installed some shorter term rewards. At the end of each Chapter he has a reward, like reading the next book of Harry Potter. At the end of each day he has a reward, a ten-minute back rub.

So what happened? He didn't meet the day's goal (four verses memorised), so he missed out on his back rub. It so happens that the back rub is delivered during our one-on-one Bible time with him after dinner. It is so important to him that missing out on it practically drove him to tears and he moaned and carried on about it the whole time. I tried again and again to find a way to help him understand that failures can help us. That we shouldn't be too dragged down by such a failure and use the negative feelings to help us change our behaviour for next time. Boy was that a hard thing to teach him. But then he isn't an easy child to teach. 

I am thankful, though, that however ineffective my words were, my actions spoke deeply to him. By not giving in and giving him a back-rub, he was forced to think the next day about what he would do to change the outcome the next night. Since that night he's gone from strength to strength and is now succeeding. He's responding positively to our "friendly reminders" and getting positive feedback for his choices.

But the whole episode did make my husband and I sit down that night and seriously decide whether we'd push him on this one. We decided yes because of several reasons:

1. It was his goal, not ours. We didn't decide to take on this challenge, we didn't even push him to do so.

2. If we don't help him succeed, he'll probably give up and feel like a failure. Making life around here pretty depressing.

3. He is too young and immature to get manage this challenge on his own.

4. This is something he is good at and could achieve.

5. This is a good opportunity for him to push through something that he can do, but is a bit hard. A good lesson to learn. He isn't good at persevering through tough things, which makes school assignments difficult at times.

I'm sure that we'll face this question again and again. Both of us are pretty internally motivated and mostly self-starters. A lot of what we've done in our lives (even as teenagers) hasn't needed someone else pushing us. It is a challenge for us to have a son (or two) who need pushing to achieve something like their potential. A challenge that drives us crazy at times. We keep praying for God's grace daily to know how far to push and how often to hold back.

*SQUIRT time. Super Quiet Individual Reading Time. You can read about it here if you skim through a few other things first.