It usually starts subtly. A child who once moved easily through school begins to hesitate. Homework stretches longer than it should, and mornings feel heavier. Eventually, a simple assignment turns into a negotiation, then a standoff.

Teachers describe the child as “capable, but not meeting their potential.” Parents hear, “They just need to try harder.” 

Over time, the language shifts: “I can’t do this.” “It doesn’t matter.” “I don’t care.” At first, it sounds like frustration. Eventually, it starts to sound like something else entirely. For many families, this is the moment when they realize this isn’t just about school anymore.

What is agency?

In my work as a pediatric neuropsychologist, I spend a great deal of time with children who don’t fit the mold of a “typical learner.” Some have ADHD or autism, and some have learning disorders. Others have profiles that are simply uneven; they are exceptional in one area, unexpectedly challenged in another.

Many of these children have tremendous potential, are creative and perceptive. What they are often losing, quietly and over time, is something far more foundational: a sense of control over their own lives.

In psychology, this is described as locus of control. Children with an internal locus of control believe their actions influence outcomes, while those with an external locus of control experience life as something that happens to them.

In more practical, everyday terms, this is what I refer to as agency — the lived experience that effort matters, that choices have impact and that you are not just along for the ride.

When children have agency, they persist, tolerate frustration and stay engaged. When they lose it, even very capable children begin to withdraw. Research consistently shows that this sense of agency is deeply tied to motivation, resilience and mental health.

The problem is that many children lose agency in environments that were never designed with their brains in mind.Modern classrooms place heavy demands on skills such as sustained attention, organization, impulse control and planning.

These skills rely on the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which develops gradually over time and often more slowly in children with neurodevelopmental differences. This often creates a significant disparity between a child’s ability toreason at a high level and their ability to work efficiently.

The tremendous difficulty it takes them to regulate their bodies and sustain their attention to inherently uninteresting information leads to inconsistency and careless mistakes. From the outside, these children can be seen as lazy or unmotivated. From the inside, it feels like trying hard and not getting the expected result. When that happens repeatedly,the brain adapts and begins to conserve energy.

It naturally avoids tasks that feel unpredictable. What adults often interpret as laziness is, more accurately, a learned response to a loss of agency — or learned helplessness.

Over time, this pattern not only undermines a child’s academic performance, but it also shapes their identity. Children begin to internalize a narrative about themselves that reflects their experience in an environment that is not designed forthe way they learn. They come to believe that they are incapable or behind or simply “not a good student.” 

If these experiences are chronic, they can feel more real and begin to generalize to other areas of a child’s life. When this happens, emotional consequences follow. Children with ADHD, for example, are significantly more likely to experience anxiety and depression than their peers. Many of these children are not anxious because of an inherent vulnerability, but because their daily experience feels unpredictable and outside their control.

Shift your perspective

A strength-based perspective reveals a different way to understand these learners. 

• The child who appears distracted may actually have a broad, flexible attention system — one that notices everything, even if it struggles to filter. 
• The child who seems impulsive may be fast thinking and willing to take risks. 
• The child who struggles with organization may be approaching problems in a nonlinear, creative way.

These are not deficits in intelligence; they are differences in how the brain processes information. The issue is that most learning environments are optimized for a relatively narrow range of cognitive styles, and when a child falls outside that range, the expectation is often that the child should change rather than the environment.

Rebuilding a child’s sense of agency

This is where parents have enormous influence. The most effective thing a parent can do is not to push harder or demand more effort. These children are likely already trying their best or learned long ago that more effort does not equal more reward. 

Instead, parents can help their child rebuild agency through consistent experiences that teach them that their actions can produce meaningful outcomes. That often begins with small, practical shifts. Giving a child meaningful choices, such asdeciding what to start first (math or vocabulary), where to work on homework (desk, kitchen table, treehouse) or how to approach a task (use voice to text for a brain dump before starting an essay; starting from the middle of their math worksheet because they understand those problems best.) 

These seemingly inconsequential changes can move them from passive participant to active decision maker. Allowingthem to take ownership, even when the outcome is imperfect, reinforces the idea that their actions matter. Equally important is how effort is framed. If success is the only thing that is praised, many children will opt out of trying altogether. But when persistence, strategy and engagement are recognized, the focus shifts. 

In these situations, children begin to see effort as something worthwhile again. At home, this can be as simple as managing a responsibility, contributing to a household task or organizing part of their own routine. These moments are not really about the task.

They are about creating repeated experiences where effort leads to a visible outcome, especially when those outcomes are helpful for their family. Over time, those experiences accumulate into confidence.

How schools can help

Schools are also a critical part of this equation, and this is often where parents feel the most stuck. Conversations tend to focus on performance (grades) or missing assignments. However, those discussions are counterproductive and don’t address the underlying issues. A more productive question would be, “Under what conditions does this child succeed?”

When educators understand how a child learns, where they breakdown and what supports engagement, small adjustments can have an outsized impact. Extended time, movement breaks, flexibility in how a child demonstrates knowledge (e.g., oral presentation in lieu of a written paper) are not unfair advantages; they are ways of leveling the playing field.

When this happens, the shift can be immediate. A child will begin to understand that their effort produces results. When effort produces results, agency begins to return.

Small wins matter

I have sat in countless meetings with parents who are exhausted — and who have spent years trying to find the rightcombination of supports and interventions to help their child feel happy. In those moments, I try to reframe the goal.

The aim is not to manufacture happiness or protect a child from difficulty. It is to consistently place them in situations wheretheir effort produces a visible result, where failure is informative rather than final and where recovery is part of the process. 

When that happens often enough, something in a child shifts. A child who once experienced the world as something happening to them begins to experience

themselves as someone happening to the world. They make choices, take ownership and re-engage. More importantly,they begin to build a self-narrative that is accurate. It’s not that things come easily, but the child becomes more capable of figuring things out. 

That is agency. In my experience, it is the foundation on which everything else — motivation, resilience and genuine confidence — is built.

Oren Boxer, Ph.D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and director at Insight Collective.