Imagine How Your Child Will Feel Ending Up Here

It usually takes more than a few web pages to confirm a good match between SCOPES and our new clients’ needs. At the end of your first – parents-only – week in our program, you will be better prepared to talk with your child about your family’s plans for building better study skills (regardless of whether you do or don’t choose to join the SCOPES community at this point in time).

In other words, you should start Week 1 right away. Whether you take the next step and enroll yourself and your child for Week 2 will be determined by what you accomplish in Week 1.

You will then progress to a second round through the five topics when you reach the second half of our program – for a total of 20 lessons over 10 weeks. (Although don’t worry too much about scheduling now – once you are in a group, we will guide you week by week to complete the course).

We offer a supportive online community with weekly access to a Harvard-trained learning specialist with 25+ years’ experience serving struggling students and their families.

There is usually time for Q&A during each week’s live broadcast. We also try to respond to email questions within a day or two after they have been posted.

SCOPES-online is available at a fraction of the cost of private 1-1 consulting.

It is fairly common for students to appear unmotivated on the surface. Yet it is rare for a student, even a teenager, to be permanently de-motivated at the deepest levels. We find that most parents are eventually able, at least with the benefit of hindsight, to uncover the hidden reason (or reasons) why motivation may have originally waned.

While we do ask new SCOPES students to be at least moderately cooperative with our Scopes suggestions, we never insist that a student is outwardly motivated before they are invited to join our team. In other words, students don’t need to promise us that they will enjoy it. They just need to agree not to actively derail our suggestions before we start.

We generally advise AGAINST asking students at the outset if they will guarantee their cooperation (because it gives them too much power to disrupt your plan, before they understand the importance of what they are disrupting).

We feel comfortable forecasting that SCOPES is suitable for most students. That said, we do come across a handful of situations from time to time where weak planning skills are in fact masking a deeper and more serious problem. If or when such as case arises, we typically advise families to address their most urgent crises first, and then return to SCOPES after a few months, after everyone in the family has had a chance to catch their breath.

See details [here].

ADH parents generally make very good ADH coaches – we find that parents who can personally relate to a child’s struggles are less likely to ignore the long-term consequences that can result from year upon year of frustration and self-doubt.

However, in some cases, ADH adults use their own past/current challenges as an excuse for ‘self-handicapping.’ In other words, some adults hit speed-bumps in life and immediately conclude that they will never be able to overcome new problems on their own. As one might expect, SCOPES is less likely to be helpful to children in families where outsiders are expected to step in and rescue grownups from their own problems.

On the other hand, we find that while self-handicapping sometimes proves to be an insurmountable barrier, it can also be a temporary side-effect of parental exhaustion and lack of support. Many parents, once they are provided useful and effective tools to address their concerns, bounce back just fine.