If possible, underachieving children are even more numerous and less understood than slow learners or late bloomers. The confusion is related to the fact that two specific ingredients are necessary to produce academic excellence, yet the second is often overlooked.

First, intellectual ability must be there. But mental capacity is insufficient by itself. Self-discipline is also required. An able child may or may not have the self-control necessary to bear down day after day on something he considers painful or difficult.

Furthermore, intelligence and self-discipline frequently are not correlated. We often see a child displaying one without the other.
 
QUESTION: What solution would you offer for the problem of underachievers?

DR. DOBSON: I have dealt with more than 500 underachievers, and have come to the conclusion that there are only two functional solutions to this syndrome.

The first is certainly no panacea: parents can become so involved in schoolwork that the child has no choice but to do the job. To make this possible, the school must expend additional effort to communicate assignments and progress to parents -- Junior is certainly not going to carry the message! Adolescents, particularly, will confound the communication between school and home as much as possible.

‘Parents must know what goes on in school if they want to reinforce their child's academic responsibilities'

In one of the high schools where I served, for example, students had a 20-minute "homeroom" session each day. This time was used for the flag salute, council meetings, announcements and related matters. Very little opportunity for studying occurred there, yet each day, hundreds of parents were told that all homework was finished during that session. The naive parents were led to believe that the homeroom period was a two-hour block of concentrated effort.

Parents must know what goes on in school if they want to reinforce their child's academic responsibilities. They should provide support in areas where self-discipline is needed. The evening study period should be highly structured with routine hours and a minimum of interferences. To do this, parents must know what was assigned and how the finished product should look.

Finally, negative attitudes should be withheld from the learning situation. Berating and criticizing an underachiever will not make him work harder.

I must hasten to say that this procedure is not an easy solution. It rarely works for more than a week or two, since many parents also lack the required self-discipline to continue the program. And when they quit, so does Junior! There must be a better way, and I believe there is.

An underachiever often thrives under a system of immediate reinforcement. If he is not challenged by personal satisfaction and motivator usually generated in the classroom, he must be fed some artificial incentives in the form of rewards applied to small units of behavior.

Instead of gifts or other desirable objectives being offered to the child for earning an A in English at the end of the semester, he should be given 10 cents for each properly diagrammed sentence. The use of immediate reinforcement serves the same function as a starter of a car! You can't drive very far without it, but it gets the engine going much easier than pushing.

For the idealist who objects to the use of the extrinsic motivation (which is often inaccurately called a bribe), I would ask this question: "What alternative do we have, other than to let a child grow out of his problem?"

These questions and answers are excerpted from the book Dr. Dobson Answers Your Questions. Dr. James Dobson is a psychologist, author and president of Focus on the Family, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of the home. Correspondence to Dr. Dobson should be addressed to: Focus on the Family, P. O. Box 444, Colorado Springs, CO 80903.