What Should I Tell My Siblings To Get Them To Work Harder? Practical Tips For Older Siblings And Caregivers
Last month, I was home from college for spring break covering after-school homework time. My mom was working double shifts at the local hospital, and my dad was out of town for a work training, so it was just me, my 14-year-old brother Javi, 12-year-old sister Mia, and a half-pan of chocolate chip cookies I’d burned that morning. The kitchen table was covered in crumpled worksheets, Mia’s guinea pig stuffed animal, and my chipped coffee mug that had gone cold an hour earlier. Javi’s phone buzzed under his algebra notebook, and Mia was drawing flowers in the margin of her history homework instead of answering the questions. I leaned against the counter, frustrated, and said the same thing I’d said a dozen times before that month: “Can you two just work harder? This isn’t even that hard.”
Javi rolled his eyes and turned a page. Mia didn’t even look up. I stormed out to the living room, grabbed my phone, and texted my mom, who’s worked as a 6th grade aide for 10 years. “What am I supposed to tell them?” I wrote. “Nothing I say makes them actually put in any effort.” She texted back three small, simple things she uses with her students when they shut down, and told me to stop leading with “work harder” because it doesn’t mean anything to a kid who’s already stuck.
I tried it the next day. Javi was avoiding his algebra homework again, same as always. Instead of standing across the room telling him to work harder, I pulled a chair next to him and looked at his worksheet. “You missed three days last week when you had flu, right? This unit looks really confusing. It sucks that your teacher didn’t have time to re-explain it when you got back.” That was the first thing my mom told me to do: acknowledge that the work sucks out loud, don’t just tell them to power through. Javi immediately relaxed, and nodded. He’d been hiding that he didn’t understand most of the material because he didn’t want me to call him lazy, which is exactly what I’d been doing without realizing it.
Instead of telling him he needed to work harder to catch up, I broke it down to one tiny, doable step. “What if we just do the first problem together? That’s all we have to finish before we walk down to the gas station for slushies after dinner. If it’s still terrible after that, we can ask your teacher for help tomorrow.” That’s the second shift I made: skip the vague big-picture demands, and give them one small action instead of a huge, overwhelming goal. Javi agreed, we worked through the first problem together, and by the time we left for slushies, he’d finished four more on his own.
With Mia, I tried the same approach. She had a 3-paragraph book report due on Friday, and hadn’t written a single word. She kept saying “I can’t do it” and coloring instead. Before, I would have told her to stop procrastinating and work harder. This time, I said “You loved that book about the rescue dog, right? What’s one thing that made you mad when you read it? Just tell me, I’ll write it down for you.” She immediately launched into a rant about how the owner almost gave the dog away, and I wrote down her exact words. Before we knew it, we had a whole first paragraph done, and she kept going on her own after that.
I’ve had a month to test these small phrases now, and what I’ve learned is that most of the time when we tell someone to “work harder,” we’re asking them to fix a vague character flaw, when the real problem is almost always smaller and more fixable. They’re overwhelmed by the size of the assignment, they’re embarrassed they don’t understand the material, or the work is just genuinely boring, and they’d rather be doing anything else. The big future consequences we throw at them—you’ll fail the class, you won’t get into college, you’ll regret this later—don’t feel real to a 12 or 14 year old. That’s 10 years away, it might as well be on Mars. But immediate, small things that matter right now: slushies, having the whole weekend free to hang out with friends, getting to watch your favorite show after dinner, that’s something they can actually wrap their head around.
I also stopped framing working hard as something they owe me, or something that proves they’re a good student. I just tie it to the thing they want. Instead of “I need you to get this done so your grades are good,” I say “If you wrap this up now, you won’t have to bring it to soccer practice to work on after your game, and you can get ice cream with your team like you wanted.”
It’s not perfect. This Monday, Javi spent an hour and a half doing five problems because he kept sneaking his phone under the table, and I did snap and go back to my old line: “Come on, can you just focus?” Some days Mia still drags her feet until 8 pm, and we miss the episode we wanted to watch. I don’t have a magic line that turns them into straight-A students who love grinding through homework. But on average, we went from two hours of arguing and half-done work every night to 45 minutes of steady work, and then they get to go do the things they actually care about. It’s still messy, and some days it still feels like I’m winging it. But it’s a whole lot better than standing in the kitchen yelling at them to work harder, and getting nothing in return but eye rolls.
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