What Should I Tell My Siblings To Get Them To Work Harder? Practical, Low-Nagging Tips That Work
Last weekend I was folding mismatched soccer socks on the couch, the TV still playing a half-finished SpongeBob rerun the boys left on after breakfast, when my oldest, Lila, dropped down next to me. She’s home from college for fall break, and she’d spent the last two days hovering over her 14- and 12-year-old brothers, frustrated enough to chew glass. “What do I actually say to them to get them to work harder?” she asked. “I keep telling Jace he’s gonna fail algebra if he doesn’t stop playing Roblox long enough to study, and he just walks out. Milo won’t even turn in half his homework, and when I tell him to try harder he says it’s stupid. Am I doing this wrong?”
I get it. Lila’s always been the kid who checks her assignment calendar twice a night and finishes extra credit before it’s even assigned. She sees her brothers wasting what she thinks are easy opportunities, and she wants them to avoid the stress and missed chances she’s seen other people deal with. I used to say the exact same things she does, back when it was just Lila in middle school. I’d lean against her bedroom door and say “Just work harder, it’s not that hard” when she complained about a tough class. Then she had a breakdown halfway through sophomore year AP Bio, curled up on this same couch crying, and told me I had no idea what it felt like to be stuck. That’s when I realized how useless the phrase “work harder” actually is.
After that, I started testing out different things that actually stuck, and right now, most of them are working better than any lecture I’ve ever given. The first thing I told Lila to try next time is to swap “you need to work harder” for “What’s the hardest part about this right now?” I tested that with Jace a month ago, after he hid his failed algebra quiz under his mattress and I found it when I changed the sheets. Instead of opening with a lecture about effort, I sat down on his bed next to his scuffed bike helmet and asked that question. He stared at his shoes for a minute, then said the teacher moves so fast through new concepts he can’t keep up, he’s too embarrassed to raise his hand because everyone else seems to get it, and by the time he gets home he doesn’t even know where to start working. “Working harder” would’ve meant nothing to him, because he wasn’t being lazy—he was stuck, and too proud to say it. Once he said it out loud, we could call the teacher, set up a 10-minute check-in after class once a week, and that’s all it took to get him moving again.
The second thing is to stop tying effort to some abstract future goal and tie it to something they actually care about right now. I used to tell the boys “work hard now so you can get into a good college” and their eyes just glaze over. College is 10 years away for Milo, it might as well be on the moon. But Jace has been begging for a part-time job at the local bike shop downtown since last summer. The owner is a friend of ours, and he told Jace straight that he’ll hire him next summer only if he has at least a C in every class. So now instead of saying “work harder on algebra to get into college,” we say “get that grade up to a C by May, and you’re fixing bikes and earning money for that new mountain bike you want all summer.” For Milo, who cares more about drawing comics than anything else, his language arts teacher lets kids do a graphic novel adaptation of their reading book instead of a five-paragraph essay for extra credit. So instead of saying “turn in your homework to keep your grade up,” we say “turn this in, you get extra credit, you don’t have to write an essay, and you get to draw for class. That’s a win for you.” It’s small, it’s immediate, and it matters to them, not just to us.
The third trick I gave Lila is to break the work down to one tiny step, instead of asking for hours of effort. When Lila told Milo he needed to study for his science test last week, he stared at his 10-page study guide and didn’t do a single thing for an hour. Instead, she tried saying “How about you just answer the first three questions right now, then you can go back to playing Minecraft for 20 minutes.” He grumbled, but he did it. Half an hour later he’d finished 15 questions, because once he got started, it wasn’t as scary as the whole big study guide looked. Most kids don’t refuse to work because they’re lazy—they refuse because the whole task feels too big to even start.
It’s not perfect. Jace still skips homework some nights to play Roblox with his friends. Milo still leaves half his assignments in his backpack turned in blank. Lila still slips up and nags sometimes when she’s here, and I do too. But last week Jace brought home a C- on his latest algebra quiz, which is a whole letter grade and a half up from where he was. Milo turned in his graphic novel book project, got an A, and posted it to his Webtoon account this weekend. Lila said when she asked Jace what the hardest part of the next unit was yesterday, he actually told her instead of walking away.
She’s going back to campus next week, and she typed the three phrases into her notes app to text us when she’s gone. We’ll still have bad days, I know. Some weeks nothing will stick, someone will fail a test, and we’ll have to start over. But so far, it’s working a whole lot better than just telling them to work harder.
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