The wrong question – “I guess you don’t like basketball, right?”  I asked my son this question because I wanted to “motivate” him to study harder.  We have an agreement, if he doesn’t put forth effort in studying and scores low, he doesn’t get to play basketball.  But in motivating him, I shouldn’t have phrased the question that way.  In asking him the question that way, I 1- caused him stress by reminding him of what he may lose if he doesn’t study hard, 2 – In phrasing the question that way, the underlying tone was that he wasn’t studying hard and thus would loose basketball and 3 – The question was a discouraging one, not an encouraging one.  I shouldn’t have focus on a “negative” but encouraged him with a “positive”

I said it out of frustration, I wanted him to study hard but I wasn’t seeing it.  The problem was I didn’t have the right to judge him.  In the past, he didn’t study hard and we had to make him sit down and study.  The past three years were the same.  He wouldn’t study hard, his grades dropped.  We made him sit down and study and his grades went up.  This was my permanent thought.  If I didn’t’ push him he would be lazy and not study.  This year I told him he has to be responsible.  I was not keeping an eye on him, because I wanted him to choose to either study more or not, understanding the consequences of bad grades.  So reality was I didn’t know if he was studying hard or not.  I just assumed he wasn’t based on past experience.  The quarter wasn’t over and I wasn’t sure how he was doing.

The question I need to ask myself is what are my motives for asking the question/why am I asking what I am asking or saying what I am saying.  I would say that with the question I asked Jason, I had bad intentions.  I was mad at him for not meeting my “expectations”  I had no right to think that because I wasn’t tracking his progress in studying and in all honesty, what I saw was that he was better than the beginning of the year and has matured a lot during the school year. The evidence was there, but I didn’t want to believe, I wanted to hold on to my  permanent thought that he was lazy, didn’t want to work hard and was a manipulator.  In asking the question the way I did, I wanted to rub it in.  I want to remind him that he was going to fail. I wanted prepare him so that I could say “I told you so” once his grades came out.  So I need to ask myself what my feelings and motives are when I ask question or make statements to anyone (not just my son) because there are many ways to ask things, but if my motives are not correct, the desired outcome may not be good.