I have just returned from my twelve year old step-daughters parents evening. 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.

I would have to say that even though she is no genius, my step-daughter is a very capable person - when she puts her mind to it. 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. Not asking enough questions, being lazy, rushing homework, not becoming involved with the class discussions - this was most certainly not good enough and were things that made me quite and her mother quite frustrated.

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 DVD authoring services, I have to work my socks off other wise I will be sacked. I also work part time at a firm which offers a cost reduction service.

She loves to play sport and has been a regular in the netball and athletic teams. The first teacher she took us to see was her sports teacher who she assumed would be very happy with her. This teacher first asked how we as her parents thought she was getting on, in general at school. I stated various points and where I felt my step-daughter needed to improve and the teacher backed me up one hundred percent - she was also less than impressed with the school report. “Why do you try so much harder when you play, for example netball, than you do when you are in the school classroom?” What a great question I thought to myself. 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.