My situation short is that I'm doing some homework help for children/young people with math. All of them have parents who have come to Denmark as immigrants or refugees (mainly from the European Middle East). It's 2 hours every week and there's relatively few every time, so I have 20-30min of time with each of them throughout 2 hour period.

It became apparent to me yesterday that their main problem wasn't that they had problems with the math itself, but their motivation. They can't sit down for 10min and try to learn something (and their parents don't want to help, or are unable to). Instead of asking for help, they draw doodles. They don't try the techniques I ask them to (like proper alignment when doing division), or they complain something it too hard before they get to the problem and see that it's actually the same as what they did just before (think multiplication like 9x23 and 7x375).

I encourage them to do stuff for 25min and take 5min break at the football table or whatever they want to. But I tend to forget the time myself, and they're not really keeping track of it. But I plan to use an alarmclock next time.

So my question is, what can I do to motivate them? - help them to be more productive and understand that to learn, you need to make mistakes and you need hands-on experience - lots of it.