How to talk to school about your teenager
- Jun 5, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 8, 2022
There are some words you should never, ever use when talking to teachers.
Top of the list?: fun, enjoy, boring.
Let me set the scene. Your kid is hating school. He’s finding it hard and stressful. At least that’s what you think he feels - he doesn’t say much (he’s a teenager, duh), but if you can winkle a word out of him, it’s that school is ‘boring’. He’s getting detentions regularly, he’s often claiming vague symptoms, bad enough to have a day off school, but mysteriously made better by Xbox. He claims not to have any homework at all, or to have done it. According to him, his school doesn’t ‘do’ exams or tests, so there’s nothing to prepare for.
And now you get a phone call from his tutor or his Head of Year.
So this is where you pick your words carefully. And my first suggestion is that you never, ever use the words (or any of their synonyms): fun, enjoy or boring.
Wait, what? Shouldn’t my kid enjoy school? Shouldn’t lessons be fun sometimes? Surely, if it’s boring they’re not going to learn well? Yes. But sssh. Only whisper it and never admit it to a teacher. Don’t get me wrong - most teachers will be trying to make at least some of their lessons (or some part of their lessons) fun; they want to enjoy their day as much as the kids do. And anyone who has ever learned anything, knows that it’s easier to learn when you’re not stressed and you are engaged.
But ‘fun’ raises a range of problems: firstly, what is fun? What’s fun for one kid, is torture for another. Think about it - where do you stand on charades? Or karaoke? Or fancy dress parties? Sudoku? Wordle? And some lessons just aren’t designed for fun - it might be fully inappropriate (fun game about sexism anyone?) or the material they have to learn that day, or term, just happens to be a hard slog that you have to get through in order to get onto the next stage of learning.
And even if you CAN make your lessons ‘not boring’ - teaching is, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, really, really hard. It should be fine that your teachers are making sure the pupils are learning. Honestly, it’s too much to demand that the teachers make sure they’re having a whizz bang time while they’re doing it. Really, it is.
So here’s where you’re really stuck. If you mention that your kid is not finding school ‘fun’ or that your child is ‘bored’ - it sounds like you’re blaming the teachers, even if you’re not. And teachers really, really appreciate those parents who back the teachers up in urging the pupils to work hard, even when they don’t enjoy the work. It’s a little like when parents have to back each other up, even when they don’t want to, to avoid the child playing one against the other. Think of your teachers as another parent.
So. Here are some words that you might want to use instead:
FIrst off - thank the tutor for ringing. Believe me, it is a sweaty, scary experience ringing up a parent you don’t know to tell them their kid is not doing so well and a ‘nice’ parent responding (ie one that isn’t shouting) will get so much more out of the situation than a ‘scary’ one…
Secondly, try to find out from the school what exactly your kid is and isn’t doing. It might not be that bad. It might be awful. Be prepared. Children are very different at home to at school. Even if it’s awful, don’t panic. You are still allowed to love your kid and there will likely be teachers who love them too - really - we don’t go into teaching BECAUSE we hate kids - and they’ve almost certainly seen it all before.
Once you know what is actually going on, it’s probably worth trying to explain to the school how your child is feeling. If your child has talked to you, you’ll almost certainly need to paraphrase whatever your child has said to you, rather than repeat verbatim what they’ve said. To avoid raising the hackles of the collective school’s neck, you might like to pick from the following words to describe your kid’s attitude to school: struggling, anxious, stressed, finding things difficult, disengaging, confused, unhappy, a bit overwhelmed.
Make sure you don’t call out any individual teachers - he’s good with X, or likes Y, or finds Z impossible...that just puts the teacher on the end of the phone in a very difficult situation and it doesn’t really enlighten anyone. It’s ok to mention subjects - because that might shed a light on what the students want/need/are good at/are struggling with...but it’s best to add a because (if you can), ‘he likes PE because he really seems to benefit from letting off steam’ or ‘he seems to like art - I think he maybe feels he’s ok at it, but he really struggles in English because he finds the writing very tiring’. This is not to arrange a timetable for your child that suits them, a day of football and forget the reading - but it can help school to understand what your child is enjoying, hating or fearing.
Ask the school what they think WE should all do. This little word ‘we’ allows you to form a team with the teachers - and that will really get you much further. Coming from ‘we’, it will be easier to persuade the teachers (if they’re not doing so already) to view the situation, and not the child, as the problem.
Finally, agree on an action plan. Don’t be fobbed off with the teacher requesting that ‘you have a word’ or a promise from them to do the same. Unless they know the magic word, and I don’t know of any, ‘a word’ won't fix things if your child is getting into a lot of trouble/unhappy at school. You need a proper plan. You need to understand why they're unhappy and then decide who is going to do what, when, and at what point you’ll check back to see if it is working and on what criteria you’ll judge any progress. I’ll be writing separately about this particular area - so that might be worth checking out.
And if you still need to blame someone for what’s going on? Well, it’s always pretty safe to blame the Education Secretary, past or present. We’ve rarely had a good one, and there are few teachers who’ll argue with you about that.
Comments