Stop bashing parents!

Jill Berry, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, explains why children do want – and need – boundaries to reassure them that they are loved.

I was struck by a comment from a parent who pointed out that when you are at work, you have regular feedback about the job you’re doing — a review with a line manager, a pat on the back for a task well done, even a bonus in the good old days.

But a parent gets very little in terms of positive reinforcement, and listening to the news can suggest that all of society’s ills can be laid at the parents’ door.

Being a parent has to be the hardest job in the world. It can also be one of the most joyful and rewarding. Parenting can certainly be made easier if schools and parents work together in the best interests of the children, and this is something at which many independent schools are adept.

Perhaps it is partly to do with the fact that parents with children in the independent sector are paying twice over for this education, firstly through their taxes and secondly through fees. This is a significant investment which brings a degree of pressure and particular responsibility to the relationship between school and parent.

It is the dual responsibility of parents and schools to ensure that children are properly prepared for life, encouraged to achieve their best inside the classroom and outside it, and taught to develop a healthy sense of social responsibility.

This will involve instilling in young people a conviction that they should do the right thing because it is the right thing, and not in hope of reward or out of fear of punishment.

We want our children to aim for a life well-lived, which will involve sensitivity to and care for others (rather than a pure focus on self), speaking out against bullying in all its forms and showing disapproval of blatant injustice or prejudice.

There are many ways in which schools and parents can work together to ensure that the children at the heart of this relationship receive the support and guidance they need to be their best, during their years at school and in their life beyond.

Good schools and responsible parents provide young people with a secure framework within which they make their own choices and decisions, and their own mistakes.

We know we cannot live their lives for them. We cannot prevent them from getting it wrong sometimes, and it can be disheartening for parents to see their children making the same mistakes they themselves made. But these are their mistakes to make, painful though that might be, and a loving parent has to help their offspring deal with the disappointment of such experiences and move forward.

Parents cannot be held responsible for the unwise choices their children may sometimes make.

One of my school’s governors suggested that we erect scaffolding around our children, but, as they grow older, we need to begin to dismantle it.

By the time they are 18 and about to leave home for university, which is the path most of our pupils will take, they should be standing tall and secure without the degree of structured support they may have needed when they were younger. At 18 they will find they are now living independently and caring for themselves without parents on hand and without the monitoring and guidance they will have received at school level.

They will need to be sufficiently organised, motivated and self-disciplined so that they can pace their work and get the balance right. Some may be tempted to work too hard. More will be tempted not to work hard enough! By this stage, schools and parents together should have equipped them with the skills they will need not only to survive, but to flourish in their new state of independence.

So how can we work together to provide the framework and to give the girls and boys in our schools the tools they need to do the job?

Firstly, we need a recognition that education in its widest sense is the job of all of us. It is naïve and misleading to suggest that schools educate academically and parents are responsible for instilling moral values in their children. It is impossible to see education in a narrow sense as somehow divorced from moral values.

Schools and parents need to work together to ensure these young people live well, achieving their best within the classroom and outside it and developing a healthy sense of social responsibility.

Secondly, parents need to ensure that their children are able to take responsibility, including for those things they get wrong.

If your son or daughter is in trouble at school, leaping to their defence isn’t necessarily in their best interests, however comforting it might feel to do this. If a child has made an unwise choice, working with the school to give clear messages and to ensure that your son or daughter knows where the parameters are (and which boundaries they have crossed) will help them far more than being ‘in their corner’. I say this recognising that with a truculent teenager at home it seems like too good an opportunity to miss to be on their side against the perceived common enemy at school.

I remember an incident when I was a deputy head, dealing with a girl who was suspected of being responsible for writing graffiti in a school toilet. The father waded in, outraged that his daughter would ever be accused of doing such a thing. It took the wind out of his sails somewhat when I told him that she had openly admitted she had done it before he arrived.

Thinking about the comment of the parent who yearned for positive feedback on her parenting, I realised this is something that, as a head teacher, I quite frequently offer. When we sit down together to discuss a particular issue, especially if the parent is trying to set boundaries and meeting resistance, I quite often say: ‘You are doing the right things’. I tell parents not to apologise for caring about and worrying about their children, even when this makes them occasionally overly passionate! I encourage parents to be strong, to appreciate that, despite the resistance, children do want and need boundaries, which reassure them that they are loved.

And I try very hard not to bash the parents. We are all on the same side — which is, of course, the children’s side.

Jill Berry is the head of Dame Alice Harpur School, Bedford, and is this year’s president of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA). For more information about GSA, visit the Mydaughter website: www.mydaughter.co.uk

This article first appeared in the autumn 2009 issue of Attain — the magazine for the parents of children attending IAPS prep schools across the UK. Visit the website: www.attainmagazine.co.uk