The challenges of working with parents and students
The time being a teacher in this world requires not only specific knowledge but also your energy, competency, various skills, and magic words towards your work. As a teacher with experience in a secondary school, I meet different aggressive and intelligent for a show parents, and this ambiguity is so confusing to manage. At first sight, children who are sitting in front of you seem smart, careful, and tend to absorb every information in the class but out of the blue they change their behavior and you see disparities between actions and character. For example, one student leaves the classroom without the teacher’s permission, if he disappoints with the simplest things in the class or the teacher does not pay attention either does not answer his questions immediately. Recently, I have read the book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” by Lindsay C.Gibson, it helped me gradually to identify the behavioral manners of my children and parents, it changed my attitude towards them. When the school administration calls parents of students for their inadequate actions, you see theatrical performances without fees. Neither parents nor students try to understand the situation, parents solve the problem only by yelling and screaming, this is the best tool opposite to teachers, whereas the school community not solving it.
Extracts from the books:
Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience. These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety. However, if they don’t make a solid emotional connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been (Gibson, 2015, chapter 1).
This is about my children, the majority of parents at school are wealthy, they provide their kids everything except attention and love. These consequences are seen by school teachers. I can not blame children but observing their parents I can understand the whole scenario. Once, I wanted to avoid ephemeral ways of solving that and took a crack at creating an anonymous club, called “You’re not alone”. I prepared flyers with a specific and clear aim and put contact numbers and shared them in the chat (I have a separate class chat and anonymity is kept). How it looks: Do you have family problems or with your study? Do you have something to share? Feeling lonely or isolated? Within a day, two students called, one of them checked whether it was a real call and the second told his family problem. Within a month, I received nine calls, and their issues were only about family, how their parents treat them, misunderstanding, not listening to them, inattentiveness. In every speech, they begged not to inform their parents and asked what they wanted as a teacher to understand them. They need to be heard and they are bereft, afraid of punishment.
We are so hurrying to inform the school administration to call students’ parents but as human beings, we do not put ourselves in their shoes, how they hate school and home. Having heard their story, I understood that they feel lonely no matter they have a superficial background. These children grow up and their children also will have a lack of emotions, no interaction with each other. Children need more emotional connection from parents than teachers but as a teacher I want to engage their parents into school by inviting them into my lessons, praising their children.
Unfortunately, most parents do not care about their children, maybe it was an unplanned pregnancy and was born. I do not judge anyone, just watching unhappy kids in front of me and is painful for me. To help or to teach?
I think teachers are Helpinizers because they educate students, care about their moods and emotions, and always want to help. There is no sense in educating students if they feel depressed, unwilling to study, and struggle with their loneliness alone, even though having parents. They just need someone to speak and share their thoughts and to be heard. I do not think my project helps 100% of my children but after the certain constant talk, they started to change their behavior. Not only kids, but adults also need attention and care from their surroundings, as the interaction strengthens the connection between people.
Moreover, this problem arouses that most parents do not trust their children, they make decisions instead of kids and this leads to aggression and restraint of children. During the parent’s meeting, I take up relationship subjects, current generation’s behavioral manners as parents do not notice how their attitude hurts their kids. This is an everlasting process and takes a long time. Hence, I would like to mention that we teachers should talk with children a lot or create extra activities to be closer because their behavior affects the study. Private issues concerning the students and parents must remain anonymous, they should feel comfortable with you. When there is a strong connection between stakeholders, both sides widen the path towards various pivotal development, like self-reflection, self-development, and tied interaction between school and community. I always try to concoct mutual-based serendipities to ignite students’ willingness to study without inner distraction and heed the current student’s psychological situation
Reference
Gibson, L.C. (2015). Adult children of emotional immature parents: How to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents. New Harbinger publications.
Article Authored by: Moldir Seilbayeva