BA with performance anxiety

[visitor]

Dear all , my little boy 6 years old loves BA which his older brother (ds8) is working on. His older brother is working on 3A at this moment. Ds6 had a huge performance anxiety and is a perfectionist and highly sensitive :-). I don't like to label him but this is his situation. We did a lot of growth mindset training last year and it did help him overcoming his fear of making mistakes . Now he loves BA especially the comics . He wants to do BA as well . With 2A just came out . I could give it a try but I am afraid he will have a melt down . I know he can handle BA academically but I am afraid that he can't handle it emotional. Are there parents at this board with the same "problem ". I would love him to get more challenged as well , because SM is just to easy for him .

[SoCal_Bear]

Well, you can always try it and if he melts down then it's not the right season yet. Beast is one of those things either you are ready to tolerate it or you aren't. I personally think it is a maturity thing. I run into the same thing running math circle. Some kids can tolerate the struggle and making mistakes because that's what we expect/want to happen. I only had a couple at 6 who could do that...some can't even at 8.

 

[Cake and Pi]

My DS#2 is the same way.  He started BA 3 at newly 6 and just finished it last month, 2 months shy of 8yo.  In the meantime, he did RS C and D at home and traveled to the 4th grade class for math in PS last year.  He complained about how easy PS 4th grade math was.  But BA 3?  That was torture -- but he just kept going back for more.  There is soooooo much anxiety over getting problems wrong or needing to look at the hints.  He refuses all help, insisting that he doesn't need it.  Really he's likely to break down if he doesn't immediately see the answer.  Historically he's come back to those problems later like they were nothing.  It just might take him several days or a week before he decides he'll give it a second go.  I'm planning to try some other things with him (afterschooling off and on), but he still wants BA.  I keep hoping that he'll gain that maturity and accept failure as part of the problem-solving process.  It's bound to happen eventually, right?  Geez, I hope so!

 

I think your best bet atm is to keep SM going as his main and offer BA as an optional supplement.  Praise effort, but let it go if he's not up to it yet.  Keep your growth mindset stuff going.  Do you have your DS6 doing the challenging word problems and/or intensive practice?  

[Jackie]

My daughter has anxiety and a low frustration tolerance. BA has still been the best fit for her, though I can't say it's smooth sailing. I nearly always need to be nearby while she's working through BA - not for academic help, but to calm, remind her to think about what she does know how to do, head off meltdowns, and gently take the book away if she gets too overwhelmed.

 

However, she was bored and frustrated with easier math programs, so I'm either dealing with bored *and* frustrated or just with frustrated, so Beast still wins.

[Gabrielsyme]

We switched from SM to BA last spring so we've started 3B this fall. I have an 8 and a 5 year old. Both of my children are perfectionists and I handle this differently for each of them depending on age. My older daughter needs work to be sequential and she needs to cover every base. She sometimes gets frustrated and melts down but in her specific case that's how it goes. When she melts down on a Monday she almost always bounces back and works like a trooper on Tuesday. She has many of the stereotypical gifted sensitivities and personality traits so meltdowns are part of the territory no matter what we're doing. My son loves math more than anything and is very even tempered. He understands the work intuitively and I've never really found a math concept he doesn't seem to know before I've taught it. We allow him to work on whatever seems interesting. He sometimes does the same work as his sister or other times jumps ahead 50 pages. I am ok with this pattern because A) I allowed his sister to work this way at his age and she's fine and B) there really isn't anything in the book he doesn't understand already. As someone above mentioned, BA is largely a maturity thing and while it's been a perfect fit for my son as we use it I really think it would be too much if I tried to force consistency. 

[fralala]

Dear all , my little boy 6 years old loves BA which his older brother (ds8) is working on. His older brother is working on 3A at this moment. Ds6 had a huge performance anxiety and is a perfectionist and highly sensitive :-). I don't like to label him but this is his situation. We did a lot of growth mindset training last year and it did help him overcoming his fear of making mistakes . Now he loves BA especially the comics . He wants to do BA as well . With 2A just came out . I could give it a try but I am afraid he will have a melt down . I know he can handle BA academically but I am afraid that he can't handle it emotional. Are there parents at this board with the same "problem ". I would love him to get more challenged as well , because SM is just to easy for him .

 

I can't answer your question, because you know your son best, but with my child with similar traits, I have been working on my own mindset training not to fear her meltdowns or live our lives around avoiding them. Rather, in my response to them, I can demonstrate my commitment to not requiring perfection. Now, I have a unique situation because I recognize in myself the exact same performance anxiety, perfectionism, and sensitivity that I've surely passed onto my DD, and I know that all those years of avoidance (when I was in school, unchallenged by the material and getting As, and at home, parented by a mother who bent over backwards to avoid tantrums) really cemented those traits in me. We use Beast Academy. We've used Singapore, too. Interestingly, I've found that the whining and meltdowns and mistakes are worse when we are using material that is not challenging but requires certain conventions that she likes to skip over because she can do the work mentally or in her own little ways. The challenging problems of BA, especially if I can present only one at a time, on its own whiteboard or piece of paper, are more like fun puzzles-- the more challenging, the more potentially unsolvable (e.g. she has already seen me puzzling over it!) the better.

 

All kids are different, but if you have a plan for how you will handle it emotionally (the hardest part for me), I think BA may be a good fit.

[Gabrielsyme]

fralala- Yes! Learning to face meltdowns with calm confidence and to resist the (very very strong) urge to avoid them whenever possible has changed my life. All of my children are volatile and it does them no favors if I structure our lives so they're always getting what they want. As many probably already know it's impossible to avoid meltdowns sometimes anyway and letting go of the need to placate or sidestep has been really freeing for me. In a way it has helped me to feel less guilty and responsible for her meltdowns. 

[Sarah0000]

I let my kid do whatever problems he wants in BA so he does the ones he can do immediately in his head, for the most part. That means he doesn't work sequentially (and his answers can turn pretty fanciful with his wandering mind), but I don't see a problem with that. He does that with almost everything except when I ask him to do CWP for "school." Would your child respond well to just flipping through and doing whatever he fancies?