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Helping your kids to do well in school is important, but some parents overreact when things don’t go well.

What would you do if your son was doing really well at school in the past, but then suddenly his grades started slipping and he got detentions?

That is what happened to the mother in this story, so she made some very drastic changes to how she treats him, but she is wondering if she overreacted.

Personally, I think that she did overreact and she needs to scale it back. Read through the full story below and see if you agree.

I told my son to study hard for important exams. He came home with multiple homework detentions, a low grade and a behavior report. AIO for what I did next?

The year this happened, my son was in Year 11 in the UK, and so he was doing his GCSEs that year.

It is good that he is doing well with his schooling.

Any British person could tell you that GCSEs were very important, and so, of course, I had to support my son to getting the best grades possible.

At the end of Year 10, he had already finished two of those courses, both of them with a respectable 8, with the rest of the predicted grades being 7, 8 or 9.

He needs to keep up the hard work.

Going into Y11, I told him to keep it up, do his homework and study hard. Fast forward to January. His autumn mocks were long done and he had already been back at school for two weeks.

However, that week I noticed that he had stayed late after school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Something is changing.

I decided to look further, and when I checked his school journal, I found out that he had accumulated three homework detentions in three days.

Not only that, he told me that he was now on a “report” to try rectify his disorganisation.

Why the big change?

And finally, to add salt to the wounds, his mock results came back. Some of his predicted grades had fallen to 6-7-8 (no 9) as opposed to the 7-8-9 at the end of year 10.

One of his grades was even a 4-. It seemed that I had failed to support my son. I had failed what was meant to be a straightforward mission.

Wow, she is really overreacting here.

A few days after that, I barely ate. I photocopied copies of his report and stuck it around the house to remind myself that I had failed, and that my son had failed and needed to improve ASAP.

I limited his phone usage to 20 minutes a day. I told his family and other close friends that the “prodigy” was no longer one, much to their dismay.

Yeah, her son needs to work harder, but she is overreacting.

This caught the concern of many of my co-workers, who said I was overreacting and I was being too harsh on everyone, and I needed to apologise.

I refused, still insisting that my son was in the wrong for getting low grades and that behaviour report.

To put it simply, yes. She is overreacting.

We’ve still been in disagreement over that since.

This is what led me to write this for you all to give me judgement: was I overreacting?

While she is right to be concerned about the situation, the way that she is acting is a bit over the top.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this situation.

It isn’t about the Mom.

This commenter says that she is overreacting.

If anything, Mom is causing her son to do worse.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a mom who can’t figure out why her babysitter quit after what she thought was a routine question.

Her behavior is definitely bizarre.

This person thinks that what she is doing is awful.

It is clear that she is being overbearing, and she might actually push her son to do worse.

Hopefully, she will back off and try to be more supportive.