They’re at School, But Keep Parenting.
By Harald Breiding-Buss
Once the youngest child has started school and settled in a sense of relief settles over a lot of parents. Sure, it is a bit scary to send them off, knowing that you’ve just relinquished a big chunk of control over their lives.
From now on there will be lots of stuff going on in their lives which you won’t hear about, or only hear about if it turns into a big problem such as bullying, but at the same time you can now get on with your own life.
Most parents tend to mostly look at academic achievement. Are they keeping up with the class? If not, is that because they are not capable, willing, or because they are prevented from doing well?
From the child’s point of view, the academic bits are a very small part of their day at school. Chances are you won’t get much of a response when you ask them something like ‘what did you learn today’? They will make progress in reading or maths, but their attention is elsewhere entirely.
They spend about 5-6 hours each weekday together with 20-30 others in the same room, people they may know little about, several of which they really don’t like. Some of the ones they do like may just leave one day and be replaced by another child without any warning at all, maybe because their parents had found a better job somewhere else.
Within the class there will be cliques, friendships and open hostilities, alliances being made and attempts to draw the teacher to one side or the other.
It is far more interesting to see little Jack fall over with his chair and discuss with your tablemates how stupid he is than to fill in that worksheet you had been given by the teacher. You’ll get there in the end, even get a good grade, but your interest and attention is really somewhere else.
Some children are more open than others to talk about all this wheeling and dealing, but it is quite possible that as parents we shrug it off, or we see it mainly as a thing that gets in the way of learning. It does, but that misses the point.
The learning that children do at school in the first few years is almost entirely social, and teachers actually have very little control over the content of those lessons.
I have kept some of my old school tests, and looking at them I am amazed that I have ever known the answers to those questions. I have no actual recollection that we ever covered this stuff in class, let alone that a part of my brain was able to reproduce it.
But I sure can remember the teacher in question, and I can remember a lot of my classmates. The intrigues that went on, the games that we played, good or not so good. I am sure some of my adult preferences for certain personality types and dislike for others is grounded in the quality, or lack of, those relationships between us kids.
A Consumer Institute review of academic achievement by school in the mid nineties found that it had no impact at all what school you send your child to. The only predictor for overall academic achievement was a stable home environment which contains educational opportunities.
If students at a given school do poorly compared to those of another, this is due to the lack of educational opportunities (and stability) at home, not at school! A child with the right conditions at home appears to do equally well at any school, but for one with all the wrong conditions even the ‘best’ school will make almost no difference.
Other research has found that what tertiary education a person will pursue and be successful in depends almost exclusively on the tertiary qualifications of their mother. Yet other research associates father involvement (especially the one of the nurturing, responsive kind in early childhood) with educational achievement.
Depending on your personal philosophies, educational achievement may be very important to you or have no meaning at all. Either way, it is you that makes far more difference than any school teacher.
Which means that the questions you need to ask at the next parent-teacher interview is not ‘How well is he/she doing’, but ‘Is he happy here?’,’How does she interact with classmates?’, ‘Who does he hang out with?’, ‘What is she doing in the breaks?’.
Another very good questions to ask the teacher is ‘What kind of personality does my child have?’. You may find that your teacher has a very different assessment of your child’s personality than you, and most parents will put that down to different behaviour when they’re not around you.
That may be part of it, but it is more likely that your child either flies under the radar or will occupy the teachers attention in only a certain way (for example by being disruptive).
If that’s not how your child is at home, this is as good an indicator as you will get that something is not going well for them at school. That ‘something’ is probably outside of the teacher’s control and revolves around what one author calls ‘playground politics’.
Parenting a school-age child revolves around being aware of what and who is important for them. If your child is not doing too well academically it is especially easy to focus on the aspect of school that actually interest your child least (the academics), and lose the opportunity to guide their social development, which matters most.
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