Hope For Parents Of Underachieving Kids

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published August 11, 2025] ©2025

This is for every parent who fears that their less-than-achieving elementary school child is doomed to a life of saying “Do you want fries with that?”

Some kids are just really slow starters.

This was abundantly evident when I recently went through a box of memorabilia we had inherited from my husband’s 96-year-old mother which contained all of Olof’s grade school report cards.

There is nothing in Olof’s grade school transcripts that would have predicted he would graduate from California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) – a prestigious engineering school with a current 2.5% admission rate – with a degree in reactor physics. 

Olof, in fact, was labeled an “accelerated non-achiever” in grade school, a label that puzzled his parents for years. Did this mean he was gifted but not achieving? Or gifted at non-achieving?  Regardless, he was not achieving.

Olof’s first grade report card does not seem to have survived, but the second grade report card, which graded eleven subjects on a scale from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest), showed a lackluster student who was pretty much a solid “3” student. 

His third grade report card was totally devoid of ones and twos, heavily peppered with 3-minuses, and even had a 4 (handwriting).  The description of a “3” was “satisfactory work; usually does that which is required.”  So I suspect all those minuses meant that “usually” wasn’t all that common. 

His Work Habits in third grade were similarly uninspiring.  He received “N’s” (for Not Satisfactory) in “Thoughtfully follows instructions”, “Completes Work” and “Works Neatly” although that last could be expected from the 4 in handwriting.  But lest his parents consider abandoning their young slacker alongside the road, he received several “O’s” (Outstanding) in “Is courteous and considerate.”  I would like to note that he still rates an O in “Is courteous and considerate” in most areas of our marriage with the exception of “accepts wife’s housekeeping standards” where I would rate him a solid N. 

Fourth graders had graduated to a letter grade system and he finally achieves some A’s in reading.  But everything else is B, or C, usually minuses thereof.  In “Evaluation of effort and attitudes” there is not an A to be seen.  He especially seems to have lagged in “Thoughtfully follows directions”, “Makes good use of time,” Works neatly” (that darn handwriting thing again), and “Completes work.”  Under “Deportment”, he apparently needs work in “Accepts responsibility.” 

Fifth grade is more of the same, although he continues to excel in Reading. Given that he apparently reads a lot, it is not surprising that he is now also excelling in Spelling. But those “Evaluation of Effort and Attitudes” grades could definitely be better.

But by sixth grade, the lights seem to be finally coming on. An actual “A” in “Thoughtfully follows directions,” “Works for accuracy”, and even “Completes work.”  The Olof I have known all these years was finally starting to emerge. 

As I wrote in a column a few weeks ago, I wasn’t exactly an academic barn burner myself in my secondary school years. I was the blond sheep in a family of brunette geniuses. My family has never let me forget coming home from the public library after researching my first term paper in seventh grade and announcing sagely, “Ibid sure wrote a lot of stuff!”

One thing both Olof and I recall is that the reading groups were always color-coded and the best readers were always the blue group (in my class, “the bluebirds.”)  The middle group tended to be yellow and the bottom group could be anything because who actually cared?  You were never going to amount to anything anyway.

My voraciously-reading siblings were definitely bluebirds. (I think I may have been a puffin.)

Querying friends with grade school children, the best readers are still the blue group.  Some things never seem to change.

True to form, when my sons were in first grade, the advanced readers basked in the blue group, middle readers were relegated to the yellow group, the sucky readers sentenced to red. Suffice to say kids were clear which group was which (Brilliant/Average/Braindead), and more to the point, by day two of school, the parents were too. Much gnashing of teeth and calls to the teacher ensued with entreaties to move little Quentin to the blue reading group where he clearly belonged. Unsaid: “Do we look like people who breed yellow reading group children??? A child of Quentin’s obvious talents needed to be challenged!”  It was clearly beneath his dignity to be associated with yellow – or God forbid red  - readers who would only pull him down to their level. (They probably didn’t wash either.)

It was not like this just impacted the kid. You could already see the blue reading group parents getting chummy with each other and next thing you know they’ll have dinner parties and not invite you, and your child will be black, er, blue-listed from play dates. Day 2 of school and the wheat’s already been separated from the chaff.

For the record, my older son was in the red group, and my younger son was in the yellow. Despite concerns that failure to be in the blue reading group in first grade dooms a child’s adult options to a career in coal mining (or worse, a lesser UC) both have been completely self-supporting (and not in the coal mining industry) since graduating from college.

And by the way, there is nothing wrong with dispensing fries.  It has long been my contention, which I’ve written about before, that everyone should be required to serve at least a year in retail. I found it to be a profoundly useful life lesson. But that is (and was) another column.

Both Olof and I, despite deeply uninspiring starts, managed to up our games by high school and become serious students. I’m guessing my parents, if they were alive to ask, would have agreed with Olof’s mother who observed, with a huge sigh, one time during a visit, “If only we could have known.”