We do hurt each other. And it’s not just teachers ganging up on parents. As a teacher, I have seen a wide variety of parental anti-school behaviors. Among them:

• Hard-to-please parents who march into the school office with a daily complaint. At the other extreme are the scared, “helpless” parents who somehow can’t bring themselves even to visit the school.
• Parents who hope, even expect, the school to do for their child what it never did for them, or who expect it to do all the things their home is unsuccessful at. They grow increasingly bitter against the school with each passing day.
• Parents for whom any change from what they knew as schoolchildren is threatening, whether or not they liked what they had. Some parents get upset when they see children actually having fun in the classroom. I think of this as the “iodine theory” of education – it has to hurt if it’s to do any good.
• Parents who identify so closely with their children that they see themselves, not their children, walk into that school. These parents react to every teacher’s comment and every award won or lost, as if reliving their own school days.

All this isn’t to imply that parents should not criticize teachers and vice-versa. Constructive criticism is essential. But destructive attitudes are worth recognizing and discarding.

One step I would take right away is to get rid of those dull, computerized comments appearing on more and more school report cards. Computers may be more sophisticated that ever, but they don’t convey the human touch. Comments made by a computer count for very little.

Human comments can be off the mark, too. One year, when teaching a group of, as they say, “challenging students,” I made out report cards and added a comment to each one. I found myself writing on each card words to this effect: “This student needs encouragement.” I didn’t seem to know what else to say. The principal, reading over the cards before distributing them, suggested that I was the one who needed encouragement. She was right.

Words do matter. The beauty of this is that in this age of accountability when it is really hard to know for sure what we can be accountable for, we know for sure that we can be accountable for our own words.

Note: In future columns, I will identify six kinds of difficult parents I have faced and the solutions I have used.

©Dorothy Rich Associates, 2009. Based on the book MegaSkills^®: Building Our Children’s Character and Achievement for School and Life by Dorothy Rich, Ed.D.

MegaSkills Education Center, 1500 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Wash., DC 20005 (202) 466-3633 www.MegaSkills.org ; www.dorothyrich.net

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