Parent Partners
Last week I asked this question:
When so many students are at best discombobulated by their COVID experience and at worst deeply traumatized by it,
what are teachers supposed to do?
Here’s my second answer, which might sound
a little crazy
to some.
Team up with parents.
The fact of the matter is that healthy development depends on healthy relationships with reliable attachment figures. Parents. Grandparents. Other relatives. Teachers.
When it comes to trauma, strong encircling boundaries that create a sense of safety and impenetrability are essential. What I’m thinking is that if teachers and parents can link arms, that encircling boundary will be larger and stronger.
Good for students. But also, maybe? good for teachers and parents.
Here are my contradictory thoughts on this proposition:
Many teachers already do this. Kudos to you!!!
Many teachers don’t want to do this. Parents can be demanding and entitled; they can be volatile and unstable; they can be uninformed or uninterested or focused like a laser beam on their own ambitions for their child regardless of who the child is. They can be plain unlikable. Or — maybe worst of all? — they can act as though they can do your job better than you. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine partnering with people like this.
One thing COVID has revealed is that a lot of parents expect — nay, need — schools to just take their kids and educate them. So the parents can get their own work done. Fair enough. These parents might not want to partner so much. BUT: We’re talking about their children, so it might be worth a shot.
Partnering with parents just adds to a teacher’s workload. Right? But doesn’t it also save time in the long run? And when it comes to recovering from this pandemic, won’t it reduce uncertainty and the sense of burdensome responsibility teachers might feel to make everything all right for their students? Seems to me that sharing this responsibility with parents would be efficient because it would more evenly distribute the load.
Not all kids have been traumatized by COVID. Still, would partnering with their parents be a bad thing?
Here’s another thought: What about talking together, teachers and parents, about the kind of holding students seem to need? Talking and listening to students about their experiences. Thinking with parents about things parents and teachers can do in tandem to facilitate the necessary adjustments students need to make. Sharing data about students’ behaviors at home and in school. Planning shared responses so students get consistent holding in both places.
And how about this?:
Offering mutual support to each other as adults who care about the same young people.
Again, even I think this sounds crazy. But I can also so easily picture the kind of space such partnerships would co-create and the rich learning environment our children could sink into with a sigh of relief. (Hell, who needs to picture it? Here’s one example that brings tears to my eyes.)
Mantra: Picture partnership.