What Questions Should You Ask When Observing Your Child’s Learning and Behavior?
Last month, I sat on a tiny molded plastic chair in the corner of my 7-year-old son Leo’s occupational therapy clinic, my notebook open on my knee and a cramp already building in my left hip. The clinic has a bin of half-chewed crayons on the coffee table and a dinosaur puzzle with one missing T-Rex arm by the foam block ramp. The OT had asked me to stay quiet and just observe, so I tucked my water bottle under the chair and watched. Leo climbed the ramp six times in a row, jumped off each time, and never even glanced at the cutting activity laid out for him on the table. I scribbled in my notebook: avoiding work, distracted, won’t follow directions. I left the observation already gearing up to talk about how we needed to work on listening skills at home.
We sat at the front desk after, drinking lukewarm lemon water from paper cups, and when I showed her my notes, she just flipped the notebook around and pointed to my bullet points. “You wrote down what you think he’s doing wrong,” she said. “But what questions did you ask about what he’s actually doing?” She explained that most of the time, parents, teachers, even new providers show up to observe with a problem already in mind, so they only see what confirms that problem. She didn’t give me a fancy intervention plan that day. She just walked me through a few simple questions to keep in my head any time I’m watching a kid struggle, or talking to someone who works with my kid.
I tried them out at Leo’s parent-teacher conference the next week. Usually I show up with a list of my own concerns and ask the generic “how’s he doing?” “is he behaving?” This time I led with the first question I remembered: What does he choose to do when he has unstructured free time? His teacher paused, thought for a second, and told me something I never knew. Leo spends every free choice period building marble runs on the back shelf. He never picks up crayons, never joins the playdough table, never chooses drawing for free art. That small answer clicked something into place for me. I’d spent months wondering why he fights homework so much more than any other kid I know. It’s not that he hates school, or that he’s stubborn. He’s been avoiding any work that requires holding a pencil for as long as he can get away with it. I just never saw the pattern, because at home after school he’s either outside riding his bike or watching Minecraft clips, so he never has to choose.
The second question is: When does the problem show up, and when doesn’t it? I’d been telling everyone Leo has bad fine motor skills, so that’s what everyone expected to see. But when I asked his teacher this question, she pointed out that he opens his own sticky snack bags every day, ties his own sneakers without asking for help, and once put together a 100-piece Lego set during indoor recess that most second graders struggle to finish. The problem only pops up when he has to hold a pencil and make controlled, straight lines for writing. That changed everything. Instead of planning 20 minutes of extra general fine motor practice every night, we only needed to work on pencil grip and that specific controlled movement for 5 minutes a day. It’s way easier on both of us, and we’ve already seen more progress than we did in three months of random playdough exercises.
The third question is: What does he do when he gets stuck, before you step in to help? I tried this at home last week, when Leo sat down to do his sentence writing homework. Normally, the second he complains his hand hurts, I jump off the couch, adjust his grip, tell him to take a break, even offer to write a couple letters for him. This time I sat back and just watched. Before I could say anything, he switched his pencil to his left hand, wrote three letters, flexed his right hand a couple times, and switched back. Then he got up and got a drink of water before coming back to finish. I’d never noticed he was already problem solving on his own. I was just jumping in to fix it before I let him figure out what he needed.
A couple weeks ago, his teacher texted me saying Leo was talking too much during silent reading, disrupting the kids around him. Instead of immediately saying I’d sit down and talk to him about being respectful, I asked her to walk through those three questions with me. Turns out, he only talks when silent reading is 20 minutes in, after he’s already struggled through the harder words in his chapter book. He doesn’t talk during whole group read aloud, and he doesn’t talk when he’s reading a graphic novel with lots of pictures. When he gets stuck on a word, he turns to his friend to ask instead of raising his hand, because he doesn’t want to hold up the whole class. Instead of moving his seat all the way across the room, the teacher gave him a little whisper phone to sound out words, and a sticky note to mark the words he can’t get so he can ask after reading. The talking dropped by more than half.
We still have bad nights. Last Tuesday, Leo threw his pencil across the table after writing three sentences and said he was never doing homework again. We still don’t have all the answers, and his handwriting still looks like a first grader’s halfway through second grade. But these questions have shifted something for me. I used to walk into every conference, every homework session, already ready to find the flaw in Leo or in how we’re raising him. Now I just slow down and ask those three questions first. It doesn’t fix everything, but it keeps me from jumping to the wrong conclusion, which turns out to be the most common mistake I make as a parent. Some days, that’s enough.
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