Earlier this month I was invited onto the Stephen Nolan radio show
to discuss the recent news story of a woman in England who was PAYING her son to revise for his A-Levels.
And on first glance I got pretty wound up about the idea. Basically the story was that 41 year old mother Katerina Diamond from Weston-super-Mare was paying her son Oliver £7-per-hour to study for his exams.
In a nutshell Oliver could earn up to 1-hr per day. But I wasn’t really convinced on her methods.
In the article published by The Sun Online Katerina claimed it was no different to adults being paid to work. She also said: “I wanted to find a way to motivate my son on a daily basis, not just reward him at the end for a job well done as that was too distant a goal, and possibly too much pressure.
“My husband agrees with my method and is pleased that something is motivating our son to actually revise.”
No matter how much I wanted to get behind this idea I couldn’t.
What would concern me about it is the bad precedent it sets for teenagers across the country. For me, education and learning is an integral part of growing up and to monetise it in this way where teenagers were expecting payment for their efforts I felt could end up increasing the gap between those who have and those who have not. I wondered could it ultimately have an impact on whether or not doors of opportunity were only opening to young people whose parents had the most money.
Of course there was the argument that it could be teaching Oliver the value of money but ultimately I didn’t believe so. I also didn’t believe that it was showing him the importance of study and how it’s just a fact of life – something we all have to get on with and just do if we want to progress in life.
I worried that in some small way was it actually putting him in control of his parent?
It got me thinking about when I did my own A-Levels. If the truth be known I was more interested in posing in Botanic Gardens with my classical history books hoping to get myself a boyfriend from Queen’s University than I was reading Herodotus and Thucydides. I just wasn’t academic in how I learned. I studied quite a bit but my memory is horrendous (something I now understand to be a symptom and side effect of hypothyroidism which I have). Although I went on to Belfast Institute and Queen’s my grades weren’t particularly great for a grammar school educated kid.
Anyway, point of me recalling my own A-Level experiences is this. I am dumbfounded at the fact that Katerina thinks that 1hr per night study time is enough. I mean, there is no way 1hr a night is enough to get someone through 3 (or sometimes 4) A-Levels. And if it is, then I was even less academic than I originally thought.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that we should incentivise our children to do well. It’s important to encourage our children and where appropriate put reward systems in place to help them live up to their potential and be the best that they can be. However, I have yet to be convinced that opening the flood gates to paying teenagers to do something that they just simply have to do is a productive use of our money.
What’s really played on my mind for over a week now is whether or not this story is genuine and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably not. Half way down the article on The Sun Online there was quite a blatant plug for Katerina’s latest book which, by the way, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Sunday Times and The Sun are owned by the same company.
As a publicist I realised that I had been duped. I’d fallen for the bait. I didn’t buy her book but I did get embroiled in a debate about her life and therefore made her “more famous”.
So, despite the “mum paying son to study” story being an obvious publicity stunt I do think there’s a conversation worth having around what our teens expect these days and what, as parents, we should be prepared to give.
Luckily my child is just 4-years-old and I can guarantee he will never be paid to study for his exams.