With each school year comes a new teacher, a new classroom environment and new challenges to raising your child. Keeping a great child-parent-teacher relationship is key to a successful year.
Once your children head to school, their teacher becomes one of the greatest influences in their life. This fact alone highlights just how important it is for you, as a parent, to maintain a great parent-teacher relationship, specifically one that includes your child as part of the communication process.
The primary goal of your child’s teacher is to support, encourage and teach your child. To teach them life skills and academic knowledge, and to support them as they learn to interact with their peers. These goals are very similar to your goals as a parent, and when you can work together with a teacher it provides the chance for your child to be supported and successful during their education.
Ways to boost the child-parent-teacher relationship
Introduce yourself
Your child’s teacher won’t know who you are, or that you belong to your child unless you take the initiative to introduce yourself. This doesn’t need to happen on the first week of school, beyond a quick hello, as the beginning of the school year is often a crazy time. Once the school year settles down, or if you find a way to grab the teacher’s attention, introduce yourself and let them know you’re available.
Address concerns you have
If there’s something in particular that concerns you about your child, their abilities, their progress or the fact they may have special needs, make an appointment with their teacher. It can be difficult for a teacher to make time to chat to 30 parents at the end of the day, and by making an appointment, you’ll achieve one-on-one, focused attention from the teacher and be able to achieve stronger outcomes.
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Stay calm and clear
The best way to handle any relationship is to stay calm and focus on the positives, and a child-parent-teacher relationship is no different. By ranting or getting angry you’re less likely to be focused on reaching the best outcomes. Teachers are only human and by instinct will become defensive if attacked out of anger by a disgruntled parent. Know what you want to say and try to work together for a solution; after all, gaining the best outcome for your child is your common goal.
Be positive and respectful
Even if you’re frustrated with your child’s school or teacher, don’t let this be apparent to your child. Children are masters at understanding and interpreting their environment, and if they sense your frustration they will carry the same feelings with them to school. Focusing on a negative attitude will do nothing to help your child maintain a great school life or child-teacher relationship. Respect is of utmost importance so maintaining a respectful relationship all round teaches your child how to handle confrontation in a positive way if there are problems.
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