Motivation and mental health

Once children start schooling; they automatically begin forming beliefs on their school’s related educational successes and failures. This means, taking young students to schools for enrolment is not only an issue but also creating friendly and motivational environments that nourish their mental health matters a lot.

Psychologically the term motivation means the act or process of giving someone a reason for doing something.

The act or process of motivating someone involves the internal and external behaviours of an individual that scale up a complete being. This influences an individual to do something or to shift from certain behaviours towards the better ones or worse ones. It is thus, the work of motivation to influence an individual either to do better or worse depending on the kind of environment one is exposed to.

Thus; motivation can be an internal drive that directs behaviour of an individual towards some achievement. The role of motivation in the teaching-learning process in schools is that it has great impact towards developing student’s mental health.

Both parents and teachers conduct early childhood interventions in enhancing mental and emotional well-being support in their academic progress.

Some of the motivations that boost psychological health of students is giving gifts to the students who do better in their academic studies, or those who win in school’s competition games, to mention a few.

In most primary schools, there had been the provision of exercise books and pens to the best three students in each class who do better in their exams. This kind of educational motivation in schools encourages other students to work hard and fully to their capability towards doing better academically.

Motivations like giving students rewards, using words like “Excellent, Very good, You have done better”, encourages good work done by students have positive impact in helping students to keep working hard for the sake of receiving more rewards.

When students are well motivated, they come up with strategies that put more efforts in enhancing better mental health.

Both parents and teachers in schools must work cooperatively in motivating students towards realising their full potential by showing them how to cope with stress, work productively, and give meaningful contributions to their school’s planned academic activities.

There must be a well defined connection between students with ongoing school’s academic activities aiming at strengthening building student’s mental health.

Currently there are some students, as it is said; more than one among four leave schools before graduating. This shows that many more are physically present in the classroom but largely mentally absent. They fail to fully involve themselves in the learning process.

There must be a way forward that teachers and parents help their students in staying positive towards classroom’s lessons.

In most cases, students need good environment that ignite their psychological motives towards working hard and achieving the best in their educational progress.