Tutors from England have often come across cases where teenagers are lazy because they have been spoilt by their mothers, who are not strict enough with them. And the father is too busy to get involved. As a result the teenagers do not have sufficient discipline in their lives to do adequately well at school. 

It is very difficult to be a perfect parent. Being strict with a child means balancing affection and discipline. In a perfect family there is a natural balance between the mother and father. But often children spend more time with the mother who has more influence on them. The missing father's attention upsets this balance.

A child can thrive within unspoken, known boundaries. Loving but firm. He learns emotional responsibility and consequences - "if I don't do this, then I'll get this or mummy will get upset and I don't want that". If a boundary is crossed, something has to happen, otherwise the boundary is meaningless.

Veer too much to towards being loving, the discipline is not there. Making excuses for the child, being too easy going, makes him not learn to be accountable for his actions. Veering to too much discipline and the love is not there. There is not encouragement towards positive rewards. Both have the exactly the same effect. Too much love they get away with murder, too much discipline and they'll rebel and not do their homework. There has to be a very subtle blend.

An unbalance very often results in their school thinking that the child is scholastically slow and needs some extra tuition, hence the need for a tutor, whereas in fact the child is intellectually perfectly adequate, but needs some coercion to succeed at school. 

Clearly an hourly tutor will be of absolutely no help to such a child. This is where a full-time, residential tutor can tremendously change the character of a child, living with the family 24 hours a day and changing his attitude towards studying – and towards life in general. The child learns a road-map with the tutor showing the way with expectations and establishing boundaries. Long after the tutor has gone, that respect and admiration for the tutor is still there. The tutor's attitude towards life lingers on. Our tutors enthuse, motivate and inspire their pupils and encourage them to work diligently at their studies and Tutors from England have been very successful at changing teenagers’ attitude towards studying.

Read an example about  Spoiling in our Tutor Talks.