Parent-School Relationships: Presume Baggage… and Carry On! – Part 1
By Jon Springer
When students are dysregulated or behaving in non-preferred ways, educators and adults learn to inquire: what’s behind the behavior? It can help a lot to bring the same curiosity when approaching parent-school relationships.
Over the years I have talked to plenty of parents frustrated with responses from school staff. And I have heard from plenty of educators who are frustrated by how parents receive and process conversations with them.
In this first installment of a four-part series on parent-school relationships, we’ll unpack why and how acknowledging, respecting, and getting curious about the baggage everyone brings to conversations matters.
Presume Baggage
Parents of children who are neurodivergent or disabled are likely to enter conversations with baggage. For educators, it is important to not take distrust, negative tone, and assertive complaints personally.
If they are taken personally, it brings about a defensive reaction. Defensive reactions close down proper listening, curiosity, and the opportunity to co-regulate, empathize, and connect with the family.
Before their children started school, many families have already experienced sideways looks and dismissive comments about their children’s differences. These have happened at playgrounds, beaches, family functions, shopping centers, and so on.
I speak from personal experience. I can still vividly picture a colleague’s head tilted 45 degrees, staring at my child’s behavior at a school staff beach party a decade ago. I can still hear a woman yelling at me at a bus stop in Paris that what I was doing to keep my child safe was harmful and wrong 12 years ago. These things stay with us.
And if children are older, it should be presumed that parents have had at least one negative interaction with a school staff member along their child’s education journey.
Things that happened with one teacher nearly a decade ago have made me “that parent” for many years.
Who’s “that parent”? We are the parents who will ask teachers the same questions multiple times in the same meeting, then follow up a few weeks later to confirm that what was promised is actually happening, then verify the same thing multiple times in the next parent-teacher meeting.
What made me “that parent”? A teacher I made a specific request to, a teacher who said yes and confirmed to me they would follow through, privately told a colleague they were *not* doing what I asked because they philosophically did not agree with it.
One teacher who loses a parent’s trust can impact that parent’s relationship with every other school staff member for years. In parent support group conversations, parents bring up things that happened with schools 5 and 10 years ago with deep emotion: sometimes tears, sometimes anger, sometimes both.
Presuming parents come with baggage helps remove the urge to take things personally in a meeting. Presuming baggage creates space to be curious when parents express frustration, to ask to hear more, to dig deeper into the history of both their child’s and their own relationship with schools. Presuming baggage creates an opportunity to turn a heated conversation into a genuine partnership.
… And Carry On
A separate source of frustration for parents is that they often feel their expertise in their own child is undervalued. From the moment parents become aware of a diagnosis or difference, they begin researching and learning how to better support their child.
Parents may not acknowledge their child’s diagnosis due to pride or culture. However, I recommend avoiding the language that parents are in “denial” about their child’s differences.
Parents observe their children closely from birth. And from the first time their children encounter other children their age at a family event, playground, or store, parents are already comparing and noticing.
When my children were younger, I overheard people saying I was in denial. They did not know we had already seen two educational psychologists, three different speech therapists, two different behavior therapists, an occupational therapist, and so on.
I was not ready for that conversation with the school and still hoped we could do enough intervention to get my kids on track with their peers. I had pride and thought I was protecting my kids from being labeled.
And, I still had accrued a lot of expertise from all those professionals.
Reframing information about our children and optimism for their future is not denial. In fact, parental optimism and the reframing of challenges as positives can be a driving force in children’s development and their capacity to overcome.
I have known parents with no background in education before having children who did not simply develop expertise. They:
- became Orton-Gillingham certified
- earned a master’s in teaching
- became a certified ADHD coach
- became an occupational therapist
- completed a Ph.D. in education
- became a certified Executive Function coach
The list could go on. As parents develop expertise about their child, they want to feel heard and acknowledged for what they know. And when educators start by presuming baggage and carrying on, the parent-school partnership can finally take off.
In the next three parts of this series, we will discuss: phrases in parent-teacher conversations that can be detrimental to parent-teacher relationships and understanding; the lack of professional development in conducting parent-teacher conversation; and what parents may not understand about the full role of an education professional.
