Parents can be tricky for teachers and administrators to manage. They love their kids dearly, but the way that love gets expressed to teachers and school leaders can sometimes be less than constructive. Teachers often report that managing parents is among their least-favorite parts of the job.
But just like students who behave badly because they don’t know how to manage their emotions, parents sometimes behave badly because they feel powerless to help their child succeed. This is particularly true for parents with teens, when the stakes are higher, and many kids act as if they would rather eat nails than talk to a mom, dad or caregiver.
Parents with academically unmotivated and disengaged kids are often at their wits’ end. When kids are in third grade, 76 percent say they love school. By 10th grade, that number has flipped: Only 24 percent say they do.
But parents aren’t powerless. They have way more influence than they — and teachers — realize, we found in research for our recent book.
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The evidence that parents matter a lot is rock solid. In the early 1980s, Herbert Walberg, a pioneering professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a major study about what drives student learning. He found a key driver was the “alterable curriculum of the home” — namely, what parents talk about and do with their kids.
Key to this were parent-child conversations about everyday events. So too were encouragement and discussion of books that parents or children were reading for fun as well as monitoring and joint critical analysis of TV shows (social media didn’t exist in the 1980s, but it’s just as easy to comment on Taylor Swift’s outfit changes during the Eras tour as it was to comment on the Fonz’s lack of outfit changes).
He also found that peer activities and smiles, laughter, caprice, serendipity and expressions of affection had positive effects. The alterable curriculum of the home, often ignored in education, was two times more predictive of academic learning than socioeconomic status, he found.
Thirty years later, evidence for the positive effects of these types of parent-child interactions has accumulated. Findings from almost 450 studies demonstrate U.S. parents’ influence on student engagement, well-being and learning.
When children are in preschool, the most effective form of the alterable curriculum is the time parents spend with them playing with blocks, singing songs and reading bedtime stories; the millions of times kids point to objects and name them “dog,” “tree” and “plane”; and everything else that helps young kids start to make sense of the world.
But when kids get older, the best thing parents can do to support their engagement and learning in school is “discussion and encouragement.” Translation: Talk to them about what they learn at school and what is happening in their lives, cheer them on in their academic pursuits and help them get through hard times.
Meaningful discussions about their kids’ interests, experiences and challenges, their thoughts and feelings serve as the foundation for children’s love of learning, the fertile ground that breeds student motivation, curiosity and engagement.
This, much more than direct homework assistance, helps teens grow and plays a crucial role in shaping their relationship with learning.
Related: What the research says about the best way to engage parents
So, teachers who are struggling with disengaged students don’t have to try and turn things around all on their own. Partnering with parents can help. Here are three easy strategies for teachers:
1. Encourage parents to talk to their kids about the content of their learning. Send parents a few topics you are covering and encourage them to come up with some questions to ask about those topics. Parents can even ask a generative AI for help. Explain that the goal is not to quiz kids on chemistry but rather signal that you value what they are doing and are curious about what they are learning. Learning is hard: Asking about it communicates that you get this. This is different from inquiring about test scores.
2. Help parents avoid a fixed mindset. Encourage parents to refrain from saying things like “I’m not a poetry person,” or “I’m not a math person.” One educator told us: “If you say that, then the kids are like, ‘Oh, that’s an option. It’s an option for me not to be a poet or a math person.’ ”
Math anxiety is real and contagious, documented in research around the world. When parents say they aren’t a math person, it gives permission to kids to check outof that subject. Parents don’t have to lie and say they love math, but they can choose to communicate that it is worth persevering and getting help if needed, because math is an essential life skill.
3. Suggest that parents ask their kids about their favorite class before asking about one they’re struggling in. Too often, when a child is struggling, parents, out of love and concern, double down on that rather than reminding their child of the times they enjoy school and are successful in it. Asking a kid who is struggling with English about English every day is like someone asking you about your most annoying work colleague or irritating project every day.
To parents today, the path to their children’s success is foggy. That stresses parents out and leads them to fixate on what they think they can influence, like grades. Parents need assurances that talking about their children’s learning, avoiding a fixed mindset and talking more about what’s working rather than focusing on what’s not will make them feel less powerless. They may even show up in your inbox or at the parent-teacher conference a little less anxious.
Jenny Anderson, an award-winning journalist and author of the substack How to Be Brave, and Rebecca Winthrop, a leading global authority on education at the Brookings Institution and author of the newsletter Winthrop’s World of Education, are the authors of “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.”
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about parents and school success was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.