Good perspective, thanks. Wow, actually enjoyed teenagers. First time I’ve heard that in a long time.
So lets see here. your kid is still making A’s and B’s (which is above average). He quit a sport. So what? It sounds like you care more about the team than he does
I would leave it alone. He is making above average grades, not into crime, drugs, etc. If you push him about the grades you might give him a complex. If he was dropping to D’s it might be different.
You’re going to give him a complex if you nag him about the miniscule drop in his grades. I got A+/A-/B+ all through elementary school, but the moment my ass hit middle school, I started to get–gasp!–more Bs. And even a C!
The reason for this was simple: my teachers had all suddenly become mean hardasses and the concepts I was having to learn were more difficult (I will never forget when my father, who is an educator, couldn’t help me with my sixth grade math homework. That’s when I knew my teacher was wack.) It wasn’t for lack of trying that my grades had started to slip, and it would have crushed me if my parents had said I wasn’t trying hard enough. Fortunately, my parents knew I was.
(I also have to say that in this stage in the game, your son shouldn’t be sweating about GPAs and making the top marks in the class. As long as he’s learning the material and making good enough grades to stay in his curriculum (honors, advanced, whatever), then I say everything’s alright.)
But my mother, I’m sorry to say, did give me a complex about one thing–and the OP reminded me of it. Every time I would do something that went against her will (like complaining about an outfit she had laid out for me to wear), she would make a big to-do about me becoming a bad teenager. She started doing this when I was just nine years old. As a child, I was so worried that I was going to be a Bad Teenager like my older sister that I stopped looking forward to birthdays and growing up. My mother had made the teenager years out to be something to be afraid and ashamed of rather than something that can be perfectly uneventful and potentially fun.
Don’t make the same mistake, Plan B.
If his dropping out of cross country disturbs you, why not ask why he did it? If his involvement in planned activities is important to you, sit down with him and help him pick out something else he might enjoy.
Thanks again for the responses. Lots of helpful stuff.
But I am a little frustrated that a few of you might not have read the entire OP. As I said in the OP "Nothing wrong with A-/B+ but there is something wrong with just doing minimal effort. "
I’ll add that there’s nothiing wrong with B or C work either; the problem is when there’s no effort.
I’m probably as opposed as anyone to pushing a kid to do too much work. I’m aware of the dangers of burnout and fallout to other areas of developoment.
The one thing I’d like to hear more about would be age appropriate incentives for teens. Although we may just go with wonder9’s approach, which doesn’t seem to include a lot of them.
I read a great book a few years ago called Parenting with Love and Logic. It was really helpful and if you can find it, take a look. It had what you’re looking for, I think.
Anyway, with a really bright kid, you may just want to lay it out for him. Say his life is in HIS control and you can’t really do much about it. Minimal effort on his part won’t effect you at all. But it will pay off for him with minimal results. That’s just life. I can’t stress enough the wisdom of creating responsible adults by giving responsiblity to children. Real resposibility—for their grades, homework, decisions about sports, girls, etc. The rewards for responsible behavior are…more responsiblity and less parental oversight. It’s worked for me and mine.
What is going on with his personal life? Are things okay? Is he happy with his new level of effort and grades?
I think it’s completely normal to have cycles of effort in school. If I thought this was a more permanent change, then I might worry.
That was basically my parents’ attitude with me. I was almost always an A student, but for a time in junior high I slipped into B territory. My parents could see that it was because I was putting less effort into school work, not because it was much more challenging. B grades were perfectly fine, and my parents would have been pleased with that if I had been “busting [my] ass” (to quote my dad) to earn those grades. But they thought I wasn’t, and in retrospect they were right… if I was capable of getting an A, then I should have been making the effort to earn an A.
Anyway, that’s the long way of saying that based on my experience I think you’d be right to push a bit for the higher grades if you think it’s a simple matter of effort. It worked on me. (Unfortunately, I can’t really remember how my parents got through to me on this issue.)
I always thought my mom had a pretty good handle on the grades thing. Effort was what was important to her. I was thus expected to get As because she knew that I could do so with at least average effort. I have a younger sister who has some minor learning “issues” (so minor that calling them “disabilities” seems like overkill). She got As and Bs, but that was great because she had a really hard time with some subjects, yet always put in maximum effort.
If we didn’t put in effort, there was no screaming match–we just lost privileges. Didn’t get a certain gift for Christmas, or lost the right to go anywhere on a school night, etc. This trade-off was presented matter-of-factly, so it didn’t lead to a lot of anger or resentment.
As for quitting sports–I think you should leave that decision up to him. If you’re concerned about him just becoming lazy altogether, maybe you could tell him that he needs to be in at least one extracurricular activity but that the choice is up to him–?
Overall, though, this may not be a big deal. I was a gifted student who always tried hard, but then between 6-8 grades, I just got really lazy. Things got better again in high school. Maybe it’s just a phase.
Well, being only a few years out of teenagerhood mysef (21), I can well remember my own experience and much of those of the people around me.
I was 11 when I started High School and I went from above-average marks to a steady stream of average to below-average in a matter of months. I went from a happy well-adjusted little girl to a sullen, resentful and stubbornly independant little mumble. (Not that I was actually capable of being totally independant I just had decided that I wanted to be so much that I just was. So there. You’re not the boss of me!)
I came back at the the age of 17. (What’d I miss?) 
Kids just approaching/starting teens are often in the situation of having just realised or are coming to realise their own needs for control over their lives, how much/little of it they have compared to how much they feel they ought to have.
Your son could be reacting to a number of different things. If he feels there is a lot of pressure on him to do well at cross-country or that it is something his parents want him to do rather than something he wants to - his quitting may be an attempt to show you that he’s wanting to make the decisions affecting his life, therefore he’s going to.
At the same time, it may be (as mentioned by previous posters) that there is pressure or even bullying from inside his cross-country group (other members/coaches etc) that has made him feel less attached to the idea of the sport, or as PhoenixFire said, made him unwilling to have something he enjoys tainted by the actions of those people - perhaps even that if he pretends it’s not important to him, the lack of acceptance in the group won’t hurt as much.
Then again, he may simply have lost interest as all people are wont to do at times.
You should definitely try to ascertain his reasons for quitting. I’d suggest an uber-casual approach to this. He’ll be happy (possibly secretly so) to feel you’re taking an interest, caring about what he feels is important for him, but probably much less so if he feels interrogated, or that you’re trying control/alter his decisions. A conversation on whether he might like to do something else instead might be the right start to a conversation about what it was he disliked about cross-country.
If you believe he has simply had a change of interest, accept his decision as his own and let him move on. If that was his only reason, he made a good decision and should be allowed to experience a positive result from it. Ie: he gets to finish with the activity that wasn’t important to him and a certain level of control over his leisure time* is accepted.
(*leisure time - I got the impression that the cross-country was an outside-of school-time thing? Was that right?)
Remember to encourage any new activity he might take up, let it be his decision, followed by your support. (Obviously barring the afore-mentioned ‘junior heroin addict and Hepatitis C club’ )
It’s important for teens to start to feel that their level of control is increasing as they grow up. But, as parents, you need to make sure that control and responsibilty go hand in hand - and that their control increases only when they demonstrate an ability to act reasonably within whatever is currently their ‘zone of control’.
Grades are another thing. Sure, it’s all well and good to step up their level of control gradually in their own lives, but they need to understand the consequences of their decisions. He’ll need to come to know that no one is responsible for his grades except him and that he is the person that the grades are going impact on. Minimum effort is going to equal minimum results, and if those are the grades he wants, fine. But he’ll be stuck with them.
Teens are always going to test their parents. They need to know how far they can push you. They’re testing themselves as well. They are discovering their limits, strengths and weaknesses. It can be an excrutiating time and a wonderful time all at once, for everybody involved.
Just remember, different incentives work for different people, so don’t be afraid to admit that “this isn’t working” and try something else. My parents thought they were providing an incentive for me to do well in school by fussing over me when I did, but they were in fact doing the exact opposite.
Thanks again. I just read the reviews at Amazon. I’ll definitely get it.