You’ve been planning for this first year of college for years. Though you’ve been saving, guiding, and planning for years, your freshman likely hasn’t had quite the same length of ramp up to college. You know the importance of a good GPA, but your freshman maybe hardly understands what a GPA is.

While you may be tempted to have an academic debrief with your freshman at the start of a break, this may actually not be the best time for this conversation. This break for you is more about getting a reality check on how your freshman is truly doing, but this break likely means something different to your freshman—relaxation, family, food, and an escape from school.

So how can you approach the topic of grades without breaching into dangerous territory? Make plans to set up a helpful discussion about college grades with these 3 tips!

1. Prepare yourself mentally.

Your freshman might have excelled in high school. However, college is a different league. Excelling in college requires a different skill set. As a result, your freshman’s grades may be lower, even much lower than they were in high school.

Approach this conversation with realistic expectations. You know how capable your student is, but remember that adjusting to college may have taken a toll on his academics. Although he’s capable of earning mostly As, he may have not earned mostly As. College grades don’t always reflect ability.

Realistically, your freshman may be barely scraping by in some classes. His highest grades may be Bs or Cs and not because he’s showing a lack of effort. At this point in his college education, a C may be the best he can do in certain classes.

Remember that if you don’t want your child to equate his identity with his grades that you need to model this thinking. Earning an A doesn’t make your child a better person. Be so careful that your expectations are not perfection, because no college freshman can ever amount to this expectation.

Prepare yourself to react in a way that reflects a moderated response. Your freshman is much less likely to share his poor grades with you if he knows you will explode in anger. Consider what you could say if his grades are much lower than you anticipated. Plan your words and actions carefully.

2. Encourage honesty.

However you choose to begin this discussion about college grades, make it easy for your child to be honest. A freshman who performed poorly in his academics feels tremendous pressure to bend the truth or conceal how bad his grades truly are. 

If your first reaction is to remove privileges or make threats, consider how this may impact your freshman’s honesty and work ethic. Grown & Flown’s Mary Dell Harrington states that at this point “doing well academically has to come from self-motivation, not parental threats.”

You can dangle rewards or make threats until you are blue in the face, but these often do not address the root issue (which can be a variety of things like lack of motivation, health issues, etc.) Sometimes rewards or threats can spurt change, but when the pressure of a reward or threat is removed your child will go back to his old habits. In the long run, gimmicks can actually cripple your freshman.

Approach conversations about grades with honesty, genuineness, and understanding. Listen, ask questions, and help your freshman see he needs to take ownership of his grades. The problem isn’t the distraction of his roommate or his college professor, the problem is him. He can’t change others’ actions, but he can change his own.

3. Emphasize learning, not earning an A.

Recently I had a conversation with a student in one of my classes. Upon receiving a higher-than-expected grade, the student admitted to me “to be honest I stopped trying in your class, because I didn’t think there was any way for me to get an A.”

While on some level I understand this student’s struggle, his answer saddened me. Is that all this student views a college education as? A series of letter grades? A college education has much more value beyond a GPA or a letter. A college education should be about learning, not earning accolades or receiving affirmation.

The temptation in a conversation about grades is to make the discussion all about grades. While grades can reflect effort, they do not always reflect effort or (more importantly) actual learning.

A student who earns a B or lower often learns more than the student who is naturally gifted and receives an A after exerting little to no effort. The pathway to true learning includes struggle and even failure, but the end goal is always actual learning.

Discussing your college freshman’s grades can be an extremely uncomfortable conversation. By preparing yourself mentally, encouraging honesty, and emphasizing learning, you set yourself up to have a much less awkward discussion. This conversation may be the extra push your freshman needs to pull up his grades at the end of this semester.