When a Child Cannot Do Something, What Should We Change?

By Sylvia Langford · 6 min read

When children say they are bored

During my years working as a psychologist and educator, I met children who struggled to concentrate, avoided certain activities, became frustrated or seemed unwilling to participate.

These situations were often described as attention, motivation or behaviour problems. Over time, however, I began to wonder whether we were looking for answers in the right place.

When a child refuses to complete an activity, we often ask why they do not want to work. But what if we also ask whether they have developed the capabilities needed to do that activity?

This distinction became particularly important during an educational project that changed the way I understood children’s responses to learning.

What I discovered in the classroom

Between 2004 and 2005, I participated in a project through JUNAEB’s Habilidades para la Vida (Skills for Life) program in Chile. It involved approximately 1,080 children in Years 1 to 3 across six public schools.

I prepared 40 sessions intended to strengthen capabilities children needed for learning. Classroom teachers delivered the activities to their students. In designing the exercises, I referred to the school curriculum and consulted teachers about whether they were appropriate.

Despite those precautions, I made some important mistakes.

When the teachers began using the materials, they told me the worksheets were too long and the children were getting bored. I decided to visit the classrooms to understand what was happening.

Watching the children, I discovered that many had not yet developed the capabilities required to complete the exercises.

I remember asking one child why they had not simply told me the work was too difficult. Their response stayed with me:

“I don’t want to feel that I’m not capable.”

Those words made me reconsider what I was seeing. What looked like boredom or a lack of interest could, in some cases, be a response to being asked to do something the child did not yet know how to do.

When I adjusted the difficulty and divided the exercises into smaller steps, I observed that some children who had stopped working began to participate again.

The difficulty was not necessarily a lack of willingness to learn. The activities were demanding capabilities the children had not yet developed.

Being expected to know something does not mean being able to do it

One of my mistakes was assuming that because children were in a particular year level, they had already acquired the skills expected at that level.

The curriculum told me what knowledge and capabilities they were expected to develop, but not necessarily what each child could do at that moment.

For example, a student may be in a year level where they are expected to solve certain mathematical operations but still lack a basic skill needed to complete them independently.

Giving that student more exercises at the same level does not guarantee they will develop the missing capability. It may even increase their frustration.

This experience led me to distinguish between two questions:

What is the child expected to know and be able to do?

And:

What can the child currently do independently, and what do they need to learn next?

Both questions matter, but they serve different purposes. The first guides us towards educational goals. The second helps us recognise the child’s starting point and organise the experiences they need to progress.

The importance of the next achievable step

Drawing on my experiences in sport, psychology and education, I developed a way of understanding learning progression through the concepts of n and n+1.

n represents a capability the child can already perform independently, without an adult directing every step or providing the answer.

n+1 represents the next challenge the child is learning to perform independently. During that learning process, they may need instructions, demonstrations, guidance and practice.

When they can perform the new capability independently and with sufficient consistency, what was n+1 becomes their new n.

However, when an activity requires several capabilities the child has not yet developed, the challenge may be excessive.

In my interpretation of what I observed during the JUNAEB project, some activities required several earlier steps that the children had not yet mastered. They became frustrated, stopped trying or said they were bored.

When I adjusted the activities to a level they could begin to manage, their responses changed.

This experience taught me that organising an appropriate progression is not simply about making activities easier. It means recognising what a child can already do independently and offering opportunities to develop the next capability.

Motivation and the experience of feeling capable

We often assume that a child needs to feel motivated before they can begin learning. Yet my experiences led me to consider another possibility:

Can motivation also grow when a child discovers they are capable of learning something they could not do before?

A child who repeatedly faces activities that feel too difficult may begin to avoid them. By contrast, when a child understands a task, manages to do it and recognises their progress, they may become more willing to try again.

This does not mean that all motivation or behaviour difficulties result from poorly organised academic activities. Children’s responses may be connected to emotional, social, family, developmental or health factors. Some children need professional assessment or specialised support.

Nevertheless, my observations led me to pay closer attention to the relationship between learning, confidence, willingness to act and behaviour.

I also began to reconsider what makes an activity interesting to a child.

Sometimes we think that preventing boredom means offering more entertaining activities. But the opposite of boredom is not always entertainment. In some situations, it may be the experience of learning and feeling capable.

What can educators change?

When a child is struggling, changing the learning conditions does not always require replacing the entire curriculum or organising completely different individual teaching. Sometimes small adjustments can help us understand what is making participation difficult.

Before concluding that a child does not want to work, we can ask ourselves a few questions.

• Instructions: Does the child clearly understand what to do, or have they been given a long explanation without a specific action?
• Starting point: Does the activity require knowledge or skills the child has not yet developed independently?
• Difficulty: Is the next challenge appropriate, or does it demand too many new things at once?
• Amount of work: Does the length of the activity allow productive practice, or are we expecting too much before the necessary capability has developed?
• Practice: Has the child had enough opportunities to understand and practise the skill, or are they repeating something they still do not know how to do?
• Guidance: Could a demonstration, clearer instruction or better-organised learning material help the child progress?
• Response: What happens when we change one of these conditions? Does the child understand more, participate or manage something they could not do before?

These questions do not replace professional assessment or individual support a child may need. They invite us to examine the educational conditions as well and recognise what we can change to make learning possible.

Looking beyond behaviour

One of the most important lessons I learned during the JUNAEB project was recognising my own responsibility for the activities I had designed.

The teachers had told me the children were bored. At first, I did not understand why. Only when I entered the classrooms, watched the children work and reconsidered the demands of my exercises could I recognise what needed to change.

This experience profoundly influenced the way I developed educational materials and organised learning experiences for groups of children.

I became less interested in identifying only what a child could not do and more interested in understanding which conditions might help them develop that capability.

This does not mean overlooking individual needs, emotional wellbeing or difficulties that require specialist attention. It means recognising that how we organise teaching can also influence children’s opportunities to learn and participate.

So when a child struggles, I believe we need to ask two questions:

“What is preventing this child from learning or participating?”

And:

“What can we change about the learning conditions to help them develop a capability they do not yet have?”

Before concluding that a child cannot or does not want to learn, we also need to examine what we can do to make their next step possible.