This article appeared as "When Push Comes to Shove" in the Fall 2024 issue of Independent School.Not long ago, during a seminar we were leading, a head of school told us about two different parents who, at different times, had become very angry and verbally abusive to her. With the first, she eventually held up her hand, palm out, and said, “Stop! May I remind you that you like me?” With the second, she eventually held up her hand and said, “Stop! I know you don’t like me, but you cannot speak to me that way.” Each parent, surprised and chastened, stopped. Her fellow heads in the meeting admired her grit. They knew that sometimes you simply must tell a parent “No,” and that it’s rarely easy to do.
Schools need to be able to say no in good part because mothers and fathers are never purely rational about their children. Parents are understandably vulnerable to ambivalence and frustration, and have big hopes and big fears, about their kids. Every child’s journey involves some events that flood parents with anxiety or make them angry, or both. And these feelings are normal. When these happen at school, parents can go overboard in what they ask the school to do—or not do. And some parents can be particularly demanding and difficult. They’re always a minority, but they can have a big impact.
This is truer now more than ever. The Great Disruption—our term for the combination of the pandemic, the racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, and the ongoing toxic political climate—has wounded the school-home partnership. The Disruption has raised parents’ anxiety about their children, which had already been increasing for years. They are more focused on protecting them from frustration and disappointment and less committed to the shared understandings on which the partnership has historically rested. But schools have a duty to put what’s best for students at the center, and sometimes that means helping parents on their children’s educational journey and at times saying no.
Why It’s Hard to Say “No”
It’s easy for us, as child psychologists, to recommend saying no in certain scenarios. But it’s often difficult to do. In our experience, three factors make this hard for school leaders. The first is enrollment anxiety—a worry that displeased parents might withdraw their child from the school. Since the 2008 financial crisis, a significant number of schools, particularly those that don’t include a high school, have struggled to stay fully enrolled. And the larger context remains challenging: The nation’s school-age population is declining; millennial parents are less financially secure than previous generations; and there’s growing competition from charter schools, for-profit schools, and homeschooling.
A related factor is that to sustain enrollment, some schools undertook steps that, paradoxically, weakened their position vis-à-vis parents. They enhanced their marketing efforts and expanded the commitments in their mission statements—commitments they now must live up to. For example, some schools, even if they had little expertise in special education, began admitting students with learning disabilities and have faced criticism from distressed parents when the students have struggled academically. Other schools began offering tuition discounts to families who wouldn’t enroll their child at full fee even though they could afford it. And many schools adopted an overt customer service orientation, which has included sending parents periodic satisfaction surveys. This has had an adverse effect, encouraging parents to become more transactional and assertive—and thus harder to say no to.
A third factor is personal: Conflict avoidance is a way of life among adults in schools. Educators are child-focused. They spend their days with children and adolescents and are all about positivity and promoting growth. Although they readily say no to students and ask them to control their behavior, they mostly do it gently, using cues and reminders, with love in their voices. Most are at their best when dealing with children (would we want educators who weren’t?). They rarely say a direct no about a serious issue to one another, let alone to parents. And setting limits on parents who pressure them is almost never in their wheelhouse.
But these factors can be overcome when we think about what’s best for students.
Where to Draw the Lines
Recently, we’ve noticed that not only are parents increasingly requesting accommodations for their children, but there are more kinds of requests—which almost always, in our view, need to draw a no. It’s not always easy—and there are multiple factors at play—but we believe this work of saying no will have the best outcomes for students.
Absenteeism. Getting a child to school on time regularly has always been seen as a parent’s duty. But it no longer seems as important to many parents. Schools everywhere report that they have more students who, with parental permission and support, take days off, and more who are chronically tardy but whose parents don’t respond when the school raises concern. And they report that many parents now see nonschool activities, such as out-of-town club athletic tournaments or midsemester vacations that will be “enriching” for their children, as more important than classroom learning. They want the school to make an exception for these absences. Must schools acquiesce? We don’t think so. Excusing absences regularly amounts to a persistent, subtle devaluation of the child’s school experience.
Few schools have a minimum attendance requirement that a student must meet to receive academic credit. But they should. An administrator needs to say to the parents, “No, if your child travels to that tournament, it won’t be an excused absence. Her grades will suffer,” or, in extreme cases, “Your child is in danger of not getting credit for this year.” Many schools do have a policy, rarely enforced, that does not allow teachers to prepare materials for students when parents take them out during times when school is in session. Teachers grudgingly create the materials, knowing full well that students rarely do the work. Here, too, an administrator needs to say, “No, our teachers don’t prepare such lessons. They’re no substitute for being in class.”
When students are chronically tardy and schools respond by giving them detentions, parents sometimes say, “Oh, you should punish me, not her. I just can’t get her here on time.” But the answer must be some version of “We have detention for all children who are chronically late.”
Mental health. Kids’ health and well-being was not looking good before the pandemic, and it took a turn during and after the pandemic. Parents are panicked. Decades ago, parents were both less likely to worry about their children’s mental health and more likely to feel a stigma if a child needed psychotherapy. Today’s parents are more anxious about their children and less worried about stigma. (They often lead with their child’s diagnosis, as in, “Our son has ADHD and he …,” or “My daughter suffers from anxiety, and so we …”)
This has spawned some counterproductive practices at schools. One notable cause for being absent, especially in upper schools, is what many administrators see as students “playing the mental health card.” As one division head summarizes it, “Students want to avoid taking a test or just want to stay home, and they prevail on their parents to let them have a mental health day.” Their parents dutifully inform the school.
We know of schools where students who suffer from anxiety attacks monopolize the counseling staff’s time. Unable to go to class, they spend hours each day in the counseling center, with their parents’ approval. In other schools, students can schedule Zoom appointments with their therapists during free periods and study halls. Their parents endorse this (no need to drive them to an appointment or for them to miss after-school sports). But on days when the school’s schedule changes and the therapy hour now conflicts with math, parents want students to be excused from class for their Zoom session.
Making these kinds of exceptions may seem helpful, but it’s not. Parents whose child is too anxious to attend classes but want them to “stay in school” need to hear, “No, they need to take a medical leave.” Sitting in the counseling center is not only not helping her—a school is not a psychiatric day treatment facility—it’s also inviting other students to imitate the attention-getting drama she creates. Similarly, parents who want students excused from math for their Zoom therapy need to hear “No, he needs to be in math.”
As psychologists, we know that some students are truly fragile. But the larger problem facing schools is a vast increase in anxious parenting that fans the flames of children’s anxieties. A school can best help such students—and their parents—by saying no to using the school as a treatment center. A key fact here is that the warmth, structure (predictability), and developmentally appropriate challenges of a good classroom support a student’s mental health and confidence and reduce his anxiety. Nothing gives a child more self-respect than preparing for a scary test and acing it. Too often, parents’ well-meaning efforts to get their child excused from a test or given special accommodations because of anxiety undermine the child’s resilience.
Discipline. A minority of parents resist disciplinary consequences the school imposes on their children. This has been a problem for as long as we can remember, and while it’s not a new issue, a growing number of parents are now much more assertive about protecting their children from school decisions that might distress them, even when the student’s behavior is egregious. They worry about the impact of these decisions on their child’s self-esteem, his résumé, or both. Here are two recent examples of parents who needed to hear no.
The first is a couple who adamantly objected to their eighth grade son being suspended for making multiple racist remarks (including using the N-word) about other students and about teachers. The student’s comments were made in public settings and overheard by both peers and faculty members. The boy claimed that he’d only been teasing. His parents insisted that the school was falsely branding him as a racist and demanded that the suspension be revoked. School administrators had no desire to label the boy but were convinced that he needed to learn a lesson and moderate his behavior going forward and that the school community needed to see that the school lived up to its values. The suspension stood.
The second is a senior boy’s father, who, when informed by his son’s boarding school that the boy was being suspended for beating up another student, said he “refused to accept” the suspension. He was sure the school was exaggerating the situation and would not come get his son. He relented only when the head of school finally told him that if he didn’t do so the boy would be expelled instead of suspended. Here again, the school’s goal was to have the consequence it imposed be a teachable moment for the student and emphasize an important lesson about conduct.
We see parents like these as wanting the school to help them prepare the path for their child, whereas the school is trying to prepare their child for the path and to help foster the child’s resilience.
What to Do
In the current context, ensuring that teachers and administrators have access to professional development to help them communicate effectively with parents is essential. They need instruction and practice in recognizing and reacting to excessive parental demands. Although a classroom teacher may not often be the one who must say no to the parent, she is often the first to recognize that the situation requires it. In the scores of trainings we’ve led over the past four years, we have found that teachers benefit from role-playing practice so that they are not immobilized by, for instance, a father’s demand that his daughter be excused from a test and his anger if the teacher doesn’t immediately agree. We teach teachers how to be curious instead of defensive, how to say, “Oh, really? Can you tell me what you are so worried about?” and, when attacked, “This is not a productive meeting. I am going to end it now, and we can reschedule with the director of the upper school.”
The big no’s—the final no’s—ultimately come from the upper-level administrators and the head of school. They, too, deserve training and practice. It is the head who will need to tell a family that the school is not offering their child a reenrollment form because of the way the parents criticized teachers online or collected signatures on a petition to have another family’s child excluded from the school. These conversations are always uncomfortable, and they take courage.
As more and more parents request and demand exceptions for their children, the potential for conflict increases. And although with training and experience educators can gain confidence in managing conflict, it always calls for courage, especially when the stakes are high. We have found that two things help teachers and administrators find their courage. One is small: It is to realize that no does not mean being angry and confrontational. Ideally, it is said in a tone that is firm but calm and considerate. It’s direct but not disrespectful.
The other is deeper: It is to draw on their fundamental commitments to students. A school is not being cruel when it says no to mental health days, in-semester vacations, and chronic tardiness, or to being used as a day treatment program and skipping math for Zoom therapy, or to voiding its discipline decisions. It is living up to and modeling its values, chief among them its commitment to helping children learn and grow.
What nurtures learning, resilience, and self-confidence in students is a combination of warmth, structure, and developmentally appropriate challenges. Students learn much more from the examples adults set than from the sermons we preach. In those moments when schools need to say no to parents, they are saying, in essence, “You think she can’t stand this. There is a lesson to learn here, and we’re confident we can help her learn it.”
To be sure, there can be risks. There are parents who pull their child from a school because it won’t bend to their wishes. But they are few (and when they’re gone, the whole school is typically relieved). And though a lost tuition can be a short-term blow, if the price of staying full is not to uphold the school’s commitments to children, the school risks losing its reason for being. If it won’t say no when it needs to, it tacitly communicates that it doesn’t truly value its values. And when, in the necessary and appropriate situations, it does say no, it is fulfilling its mission and helping students grow.
Go Deeper
Robert Evans and Michael Thompson know a lot about independent schools, and they’ve shared their deep knowledge and expertise about the school-parent partnership in several NAIS resources. The most recent and notable is Hopes and Fears: Strengthening the Relationship with Today’s Independent School Parents, Second Edition. The revised and expanded edition provides an updated perspective on how to bolster the home-school relationship after the Great Disruption of the early 2020s.
Also check out the following webinars: