I have attended my 12yr old step-daughters parents evening tonight – that sounds a bit of a mouthful to say lol. It was an interesting hour and I believe my daughter has learnt quite a lot from the experience. The teachers gave her some important life coaching advice which I will write about in this article.

My step-daughter is basically a very bright and well behaved child. One of her faults however is that she just does enough, she is not naughty at school but does not give one hundred percent to her studies. This may be due to the fact that she has a stuttering problem; we have looked into the various ways of how to stop stuttering and I am now happy to report that she has achieved fluency after we purchased a seventy minute therapy DVD from a speech centre in the UK.

Before we attended the parents evening we had the opportunity to read her school report.In the subject the exam results were more than positive and therefore a decent report was no doubt due. What annoyed both me and her mother was the regular comments that she does not ask enough questions, that she does not contribute enough in classroom discussions and that her homework seems rushed.

We were also aware that even though the exam results were good, that they could have been even better as she did not do any revision. We told her that even though she was above average that we were not happy with some of the comments made which suggested that she could and should have done even better. She was not happy by this and had quite a big strop thinking that we were just being cruel. I stated that where I work providing external doors, I have to work my socks off other wise I will be sacked. I also work part time at a firm which offers a cheap holidays service.

She loves to play sport and has been a regular in the netball and athletic teams. We went to the gym teacher to start with – this was somebody my step-daughter was confident that she would receive positive comments from – after all she is a bit of a star in sports. This teacher first asked how we as her parents thought she was getting on, in general at school. We voiced our concerns and the teacher agreed as she had read the whole report and was also not that pleased with it. She looked at my step-daughter and told her that in sport she always gave one hundred percent and asked her why she did not have the same attitude in Maths and English. She did not know what to say and seemed quite shocked. The teacher stated that even though sport is important, the other subjects should come first and that if she did not see a marked improvement over the next few months, that she would drop her from the netball and athletics team.