What Every Parent Wants
The one thing every parent of a young person in 2021 wants is this: what is going on with my kid?
Parents get a bad wrap for being helicopter parents, over bearing or excessive — and there might very well be a few wild stories out there that are true, but by and large, parents just want to know what is going on with their kid.
Namely, whether or not they’re happy, they’re being supported in class, or they have a teacher who cares about them.
Developmentally, young adults who are 15 years old might look like they are already 25 but cognitively still have some of the emotional/logical controls as a 5 year old (OK maybe not 5 years old, but it went along nicely with the 15, 25, 5 and excessive use of the number 5 but I digress…)
Parents have to tow a tough, murky and grey line between affording their kids enough slack to feel like they are making their own decisions and living their own lives while at the same time recognizing that they don’t quite know what they don’t know and still need guidance.
Again, seeing this difficult situation that most parents face requires teachers to be empathic, set aside the primordial Tom & Jerry, Cat and Mouse, Predator Prey, Us vs. Them dynamic that colors all too many of the parent-teacher interactions in schools across education.
It doesn’t take too much to get the ball rolling in the right direction. The worst thing you can do is try to email or proactively reach out to every single parent all at once. It would be better to follow the Pareto Principle or 80/20 Rule: 80% of your challenging conversations are going to probably come from 20% of your students and parents.
I would tightly focus your efforts to reach out to parents on your 20% that needs it the most with a 3:1 positive communication to tough conversation ratio. In a class of 30 kids, there might be 6 students who need some type of at-home involvement and probably 2 really need it.
While there’s no exact science on how to do this, you can’t take money out of a bank account you’ve put nothing into, and you’re going to have a very difficult time enjoying teaching if you see parents as your adversary rather than your special student advisor.
