WORKING WITH PARENTS

Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D.

A few comments from teachers:

• Do you know what I found out today? His mother comes to school at the end of every day. She goes through her son’s locker, picks out the books that he needs to take home, talks to the teachers and collects his homework assignments. He is 15 years old. How is he ever going to develop any personal responsibility?
• I asked him why he isn’t getting his homework done. He told me that when he gets home from school, he has to take care of his five siblings while his mother works two jobs. First of all, why does she have five children? Second, what can I tell the student? Good grief!! He is already a parent, and he is only 12 years old.
• Marie came to school today so high she could barely see. I sent her to the nurse. Marie told the nurse that she and her mother smoke a joint on the drive to school every morning so that they can both make it through the day.
• Robert was very agitated today during first period. I finally asked him privately what was wrong. He told me that he was worried about his dad and that he couldn’t wake him up that morning. He thought his dad might be dead because he didn’t think he was breathing. I sent him to the office. They called the police who went to the home. The father was dead.

PARENTING

All of these stories are true. The reality is that, in many households, adolescents are taking on adult roles with very little support or information. In some households, the adolescent is the parent’s “best friend” and is given unlimited access to intimate adult information. At the other end of the spectrum are parents who do everything for the child. So as a teacher, how do you work with parents so that students can be more successful?     

In the research on parenting, there are typically three approaches to parenting: negotiated, authoritarian, and permissive. Some parents use a mix of the three. For adolescents to develop into self-governing adults who make responsible choices, it is imperative that they learn three concepts: parameters (those lines you cannot cross, e.g., drunk driving), choices (what are the options in this situation?), and consequences (if I do this behavior, then this is what will happen).                                

In negotiated approaches to behavior, choices and consequences are examined. Furthermore, the wise parent understands that certain parameters are non-negotiable. For example, drinking and driving is simply not an option. I know a mother who found out that her 14-year-old son was drinking and driving. Did she take the keys? No. She told me “he didn’t mean it,” and she added that it wasn’t that serious. After all, he was only 14 and was just “trying things out.” I wasn’t surprised when he had a DWI (driving while intoxicated) at 19. The mother had blurred the parameters. If that had been my 14-year-old, I would’ve shot the tires out of the car (I’m only half-kidding!) and given him a pair of tennis shoes. He would be walking to school.

In permissive households, the emphasis to a fault is on choice. Parameters are seldom discussed. So the adolescent doesn’t understand consequences. In authoritarian households, consequences and parameters are the emphasis, and choice is hardly ever considered. It’s very difficult to make good decisions later as an adult when an adolescent was rarely given choices. Sometimes school is the only place where adolescents can examine choices.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THE PARENT

Parents who grew up in very authoritarian households will often be quite permissive with their children. The opposite can be true as well: Parents who grew up in very permissive households may tend to be quite authoritarian with their children. Sometimes parents will vacillate between permissive and authoritarian, which can be confusing to adolescents.

PARENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT

Further, few parents know much about the developmental stages and phases of a middle-level student. Basically they know that the body of the adolescent is changing and that it’s a difficult time for many adolescents. But beyond that, adolescents usually are viewed as either a child or a young adult.

PARENTING IS DIFFERENT BY SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS

The book Unequal Households: Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette Lareau (2003) examines how parents in middle class (both black and white) parent differently from parents from poverty (both black and white). She talks about how most middle-class parents “cultivate” their children to negotiate with adults and the institutions they’re part of. Parents in poverty tend to rely upon the “accomplishment of natural growth.”

Comparison of Middle-Class Households’ (Concerted Cultivation) Child-Rearing Practices and Poverty Households’ (Natural Growth) Child-Rearing Practices

Source: Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, 2003.

Lareau found that most parents from poverty will protest but not effectively negotiate or navigate institutions, including schools. The end result is that most students from middle class feel empowered, by institutions while most students from poverty feel constrained by institutions.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO GAIN MORE PARENTAL SUPPORT?

First of all, please remember that as an educator you have much more exposure to adolescents than the average parent does. If you have taught 10 years, you probably know about 1200 to 1500 adolescents to varying degrees of depth. You also know the patterns and thinking of many adolescents, so you have some sense of what is “normal” development and what is not. Most parents don’t have this knowledge base. As educators, we tend to become impatient with what parents don’t know, given what we think is common knowledge or “common sense.” I was and am grateful that I had several years of teaching adolescents (student teaching in middle school, then teaching in high school) before I had my own son. When he got to middle school and high school, I wasn’t “bothered” about some of the things other parents were concerned about because I already had a frame of reference for his behavior.

So what can you do?

1) Provide information to parents on adolescent development. With the purchase of the book Achievement for All: Keys to Educating Middle Grades Students in Poverty (AMLE publication) for the staff, a set of five one-page articles is available for the principal to send to the parents about adolescent development in five areas: physical, cognitive/intellectual, moral, psychological, and social/emotional. These research-based one-pagers give quick overviews and some tips to parents about the development of their middle-level student.

2) As part of parent/teacher conferences, have parents identify a future story for themselves and their child. If parents have no idea of where their child is going in the future, they aren’t even beginning to get them there. And it’s important for the parent to have a future story for himself/herself as well. A discussion of what the student already does well is a wonderful relationship builder between the teacher and parent—and can readily be utilized as part of a future story.

3) Increase the parents’ knowledge base about themselves. Many times we give information to parents regarding what to do about the students. However, it is very difficult to give to your own children what you do not know. We find that when we give information to parents about themselves, they often just give it to their children. If you go to www.ahaprocess.com, we have a program called Getting Ahead with which we have trained more than 15,000 adults in poverty. The parents learn about themselves, their resources, hidden rules, social capital, finances, predators, etc. Parents end up with a future story for themselves that they have developed for themselves. We have found that this program changes the way they interact with school and with their children. Many of these adults go on to have their children develop their own future stories.

4) Understand that parent “involvement” is much more important than physical presence at school. Whether a parent comes to the school or not isn’t correlated to student achievement. What is correlated to student achievement is whether the parent is involved, which means the following:

• Parents know where their children are at night.
• They know who their friends are.
• They know if they have homework or not.
• They have high expectations, support, and insistence.

There are multiple ways to keep parents involved without their physical presence at school.

5) Use the following planning sheet before you contact parents.

Source: Research-based strategies by Ruby K. Payne, 2009

Sometimes we have parent/teacher calls and conferences with insufficient planning. We just want something different, but too often we aren’t specific with our data or with our plans for the future. When data and future plans are part of the conference, the outcomes are generally much better.

6) Put information about the school and the classroom on DVD and distribute to each parent. One of the least expensive tools is to put two things on a 20-minute DVD every year for each household:

1)     One is a 15-minute segment by the principal, which starts by showing parents how to get into the building (I can hardly count the number of schools I’ve walked around trying to find an unlocked door!), how to sign in, what each wing of the building looks like, what the cafeteria looks like, how lunch works, what the gym looks like and how it works, where to park when you come to school, etc. As the principal is doing the tour, he/she also talks about the dress code, when report cards and progress reports come out, etc. The school’s phone number and website address appear at the bottom of the screen the whole time. Finally, the principal thanks the parents for sending their student(s) to school.

2)     The second part of the DVD, probably about five minutes in length, is the teacher(s) or the advisory period teacher. This teacher talks about content, shows the classroom, what he/she hopes for the students that year, etc.

It’s amazing how many more parents show up at school just because there is a much greater familiarity with the school and the people in the school.

7) Clarify the role of the parent. When I had a parent who wanted to be their child’s best friend, I would ask him/her this question: “If you want to be the child’s best friend, who will be the parent? A child has friends; you are the only one who can be the parent.” When parents would tell me they could be both, I would ask them what they thought the purpose of a parent was. This would lead into a discussion of parenting. Often when you have this conversation, you will find out that much of the motivation is either personal experience of the adult or a personal need of the adult.

When I have encountered ”helicopter” parents who wanted to do everything for their children (adolescents who clearly didn’t have an understanding of parameters, choices, and consequences) and ended up overly protecting them, I would ask the parents, “At what age do you think your child will be responsible for him or herself?” Often the age is 18. Then I say, “Responsibility and decision making are learned behaviors. Would you expect your child to turn 18, and be a skilled tennis player when he/she has never played tennis?” They usually say no. Then I say to them, “It will not be possible for your child to turn 18 and be responsible for him or her if he/she has never had any experience. Don't you think we could work together to help him/her learn this now before it is life-altering—as in a felony or career loss?” 

There is a great deal of research surfacing now on how “failure” actually helps most individuals be more successful in the future. To protect the child from any and all difficulties will, over time, weaken that healthy development.

 CONCLUSION

The job of parenting is not easy—as anyone who has parented a child or children knows. The truism is correct that kids don’t come with instruction manuals. Each of us is influenced by our own personal experiences with being parented, our knowledge bases we have acquired, our experience with adolescents, and our understandings of motivation and behavior. Indeed, all parents bring a set of learned behaviors to the task of parenting—and if an individual can learn a behavior, he/she can unlearn it as well. If I am a parent who is overwhelmed by my own life experience (e.g., working two jobs, cancer, divorce, illness, unemployment, financial desperation, neighborhood violence), then I am simply going to have less energy to parent.

The gift that educators can give to students and parents alike is role models, information, and education, along with tools to keep adolescents on the “path” to future success. In baseball, any player who has a batting average above .300 is considered exceptional. That also means, however, that seven out of 10 times he “failed” by not getting a hit. For many of us, we think every interaction with a parent needs to be perfect, that we should be able to quickly get each parent on board with our “thinking.” This is not possible.

What is possible, though, is focusing on the well-being of each student, providing the student the tools to move forward to his/her future, and supporting the parents to the fullest extent possible on the journey into the future. Did we clear away as many barriers as possible to the child’s pathway to success? Did we provide the role models and knowledge and skills so that he/she will be able to walk that path with confidence?

When some of my students told me their stories, it was all I could do not to stand there and weep. But I knew that to show pity would be damaging to them. So this is what I would say: “I respect you so much for what you live with every day. Your strength and stamina are incredible. I cannot change your situation for you. But what I can do is give you the tools, the knowledge, and the skills so that you don’t have to live this way the rest of your life. And if you want that, I will do everything in my power to help you get that.”

This is the gift each of us can give our students every day.

References:

Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Payne, R. K. (2009). Research-based strategies: Narrowing the achievement gap for under-resourced students. Highlands, TX: aha! Process.

First published in AMLE Magazine, formerly Middle Ground. All rights reserved by AMLE.