“It’s 10:00 p.m. Do you know where your child is?” read a sticker that adorned many car bumpers 20 years ago. I haven’t seen that sticker in a long while, but there’s no need for it now. We all got the message. Parents who were in the know about their children’s whereabouts were good parents; parents who did not were clearly bad parents. Now, the ubiquitous new bumper sticker proclaims, “My child is an honor student at Sunnybrook Middle School.” When we read it, we’re supposed to admire the child’s accomplishments, but I think we’re also expected to conclude that that child has very good parents, an on-the-job mom and dad who are, perhaps, a little more involved and knowledgeable than the rest of us are. We’re supposed to believe that the honor student has “great” parents.
But what defines great parents? Is it the quantity of love they give their children? Is it how much time they spend with them? Is it the ways in which they hold their children morally accountable for their behavior? Or is it how much the parents know about their children’s lives? From my perspective, many contemporary parents believe that, along with anything else they might hold self-evident, the quality of their parenting is highly correlated with how much they know about their children: their academic performance, their social functioning, and their inner feelings. As a result — and in an effort to reassure themselves that they are doing an excellent job — parents are increasingly hungry for information. And, not surprisingly, they want their child’s school to provide more and more information about his or her school journey.
Full disclosure #1: I’m a parent and I’ve experienced a lot of anxiety about my children.
Full disclosure #2: I write parenting books.
I think it is essential that parents have a certain amount of basic information about their children. I also believe that specific knowledge can aid a parent’s ability to understand and support his or her child. As a developmentally-minded child psychologist who writes to “inform” parents about the nature of children, I would be a hypocrite to come out against the informed parent. However, there is a point when parents want too much information about their children, when they want to know things that are not of help to their children. In this age of abundant information on just about every topic, it makes sense that parents would want to know as much as they can. But many parents fall into the trap of wanting information for its own sake — as if more is always better. But it’s not always better, and parents who cannot stop asking for information risk driving their kids or the schools absolutely crazy, and undermining their own wishes.
Let’s consider some examples of too much information.
• When I visited a boarding school in Connecticut two years ago, administrators told me that they had students on campus who spoke to their parents by cell phone up to eight times per day.
• I had a friend who taught preschool at a fine pre-K–12 school in New England more than a decade ago. One year, she had five faculty children in her class and these teacher-parents, because they were in the building, were often able to look out the window and watch their three-year-olds playing at recess. From time to time on a cold winter day, one of these faculty parents would mention to the teacher that she had noticed that her son’s jacket was not zipped up at recess.
• Many schools are asking their teachers to post homework assignments online, particularly for middle-school students, those most notoriously disorganized and forgetful of children. When I.T. directors track the hits on homework sites, 90 percent of the traffic comes from parents.
• As we stood outside an independent elementary school in New York City, a mother told me that her child’s school had banned cell phones from the school. “I don’t care what they do,” she said, “My child is going to have a cell phone with a GPS device in her back pack and it will be turned on.”
• At the NAIS Institute for Experienced Heads last summer, one participant reported that a parent at his school had sewn a cell phone into her child’s backpack. With the aid of a stopwatch, she used her child’s GPS device to track the speed of the school bus from the school to her home in order to check that the bus driver was obeying the speeding laws.
Over the last 10 years, I have asked teachers to raise their hands if they have received more than 25 e-mail messages from a single parent in the course of a year; recently, more and more hands are going up in response. Indeed, I have been stunned to receive reports that the occasional parent at an independent school is having upwards of a 100 e-mail and phone contacts with a school in a single academic year. I paraded one such case in front of teachers at a school in the Southwest only to be told that one of their parents contacted the school five times per day for the whole previous year for a total of more than 500 contacts.
This particular parent had spread the burden around by calling six different teachers and two administrators so that she never called one person five times per day; however, we certainly can agree that the parent who needed to be in touch with her son’s school five times per day is in a category by herself, has a serious problem managing her anxiety, but she is only the most extreme example of a general tendency for parents to seek more and more information from schools. I believe that there are good reasons for schools to limit the amount of information that parents can get about their child’s day in school. Why do I believe that too much information is not only unnecessary, but sometimes harmful? There are five reasons:
1. Excessive parental information-seeking can undermine both a school’s mission and a child’s self confidence. It is not logical to send a child to boarding school and then call him or her eight times a day. If parents feel the need to talk to their child throughout the day, why wouldn’t they keep their son or daughter at home? When parents send a child to boarding school and call continually, it implicitly suggests either that the school cannot do its job or that the child is not ready to be on his or her own. In either case, the message is not helpful to the child who needs to be able to trust his or her school, and trust his or her own independence.
2. Children need to be free from parental supervision for part of every day. They need it for their development, and their teachers need it in order to do their jobs well. To my certain knowledge, no preschooler has ever frozen to death on an independent school playground. I doubt that a preschooler has even contracted a serious pneumonia during a 20-minute recess. The faculty parents at the school in New England were doing the natural parental thing, worrying about their three-year-olds’ health, but tracking a child’s zipper closure at recess is an irrational exercise that can only make a child feel that school is not his or her place. The lesson for the child, if repeated too many times, is that the school experience really belongs to the parent. The message to the preschool teacher is that she is not trusted.
3. If parents constantly track their child’s homework, making it their responsibility to contact the school website and become the organizing function in their child’s life, their children won’t develop a sense of responsibility for his or her own work.
A mother once asked me what to do about her ninth grade son who always waited until the last thing at night on Sunday to start his weekend homework. His request to stay up later to finish always precipitated a fight between them, but she always caved in because she believed so strongly in finished homework. These weekly encounters left her demoralized and on edge.
My strong advice to her was to enforce her son’s curfew on Sunday nights and let him face the music on Mondays. She took my advice and forced her son to go to bed and face his teachers sans homework. Miracle of miracles, he began to start doing his homework earlier on Sundays. She wrote to thank me and included a thank-you from her son, who was grateful both for the bump in his maturity and for the cessation of the battles with his mother.
Children are motivated to become organized and do their homework regularly for two reasons: (1) they find it unpleasant to face the consequences of not doing homework; (2) they find it satisfying, even pleasurable, to have their work done on time. If a parent manages a child’s life so that he or she never experiences the consequences of undone homework, how can he or she learn to take responsibility for your own work? And when does it stop? Are these the same parents who are calling employers to negotiate job contracts for their 20-something college graduates?
4. A constant need for information in an effort to control the uncontrollable will cause a child anxiety. If a parent breaks the school rules by putting a cell phone in an elementary school child’s backpack, the child can reasonably conclude that there is something really scary that might happen and that only her mother is really concerned about it. I don’t mean to minimize the pain caused by kidnappings. The possible loss of a child is certainly one of the worst terrors that a parent could possibly confront. However, organizing your life around the remote possibility of a kidnapping or a school bus accident will have an impact on your child’s emotional life. The English psychoanalyst, Harry Guntrip, said that children absorb anxiety like “mother’s milk.” The more anxiety a parent generates, the more a child consumes.
5. A constant flow of information to the parent is not likely to change the course of a child’s school experience all that much. Think for a moment about the weekly report, a service that most independent schools are happy to provide for a child who is underperforming or disorganized. Usually, the weekly report provides information to the parent and communicates to the child that everyone is paying attention to his or her performance. Much of the time, the weekly report motivates a child to improve by helping him or her focus and performance improves, but the effect — if there is one — is usually short-term. That is, if there is an uptick in grades, the effect will plateau. Why, then, do schools continue to provide weekly reports for months and months? I think it is because both the parents and teachers believe that ongoing communication is key to maintain child’s academic improvement. Is that true?
When I ask teachers, they tell me they keep producing them because the parent comes to expect them. Sometimes, teachers continue writing reports about a child for whom the weekly communication has not produced any improvement at all. Yet, the school still provides what is essentially pointless information. Is it because we in schools are just giving the parent-customers what they think they want? Is it that we don’t have the courage to tell the truth — namely that some kids are going to do school exactly the way they want to do it, no matter how much adults talk about and write reports about them?
There are some exceptions to this rule of information. Learning-disabled children with organizational problems may need more monitoring than other students. In general, however, constant monitoring, like excessive tutoring, does not change the child’s class rank or a love of school.
Independent schools are a service business; they are highly motivated to give parents what they want. How do you say “no” to parents who crave more and more reports and information about their children, especially when you are running a business in tough economic times? Frankly, it’s hard. Nevertheless, schools need to find the courage to set limits on how much information they provide parents.
For one thing; parents are overwhelmed by information; most of them don’t read all the newsletters and e-mails schools send out already (I sure don’t; I can’t keep up). Administrators complain a lot about this “failure to read” on the part of parents. Secondly, schools have been providing longer, more frequent reports to parents over the last 15 years. We may be close to — or past — a point of diminishing returns. Finally, there is a line between devoted parenting and invasive parenting; some of the time, we’re enabling parents in crossing that line.
I have taken to asking parent audiences this simple question: When you were in 10th grade, how much did your mother know about different aspects of your school day: academic, social, athletic, or emotional? I ask them to express their answer in a percentage; I require them to put an actual number to it. The moment I ask the question there is collective laughter from the audience. People start to shout out “zero,” “five percent,” “10 percent.” Occasionally, someone will say 20 or 25 percent, but invariably someone shouts, “Zero, and I worked hard to keep it that way!”
Once we have established that, as teenagers, all of these now parents tried to keep their lives separate if not secret from their parents, I ask a second question. I say to them, “If your mother had known twice as much about your day in high school, if she had known 20 percent about what your did rather than just 10 percent, would it have made a difference?” Again, the audience laughs and shakes their heads. I believe that adults have the common sense to remember that parents not only cannot know everything about their kids, but that it is probably not helpful to the child for a parent to know everything.
When parents send a child off to school, whether at the kindergarten level or the high school level, they are going to be deprived of information about the child’s day, about his or her feelings and motivations. They cannot possibly track every facet of a child’s journey through school. That is, as the Buddhists say, the “suchness” of school. It is unnatural to try. Our schools need to remind parents of this reality. The best part of this is that most parents will respond positively because they intuitively know this truth. After all, they were all students once themselves. The “Information Age” has deluded all of us into thinking we can know everything, see everything, and ultimately control everything. We cannot. In the end, that’s the wisdom we all learn from parenting.
That does not mean, however, that parents have no way to tell whether their children are having a good school experience. If their children get up in the morning and go off to school in a reasonably optimistic frame of mind, if they feel connected to friends and to some teachers, if they feel recognized for some talent or ability and if they are developing a sense of power or mastery, then they are getting what they need from school. Connection, recognition, and mastery are the not-so-secret ingredients of a successful school experience. Every parent has it in his or her power to learn whether his or her son or daughter is feeling related and known and is growing in his or her sense of mastery at school. Obtaining that knowledge does not require knowing every little piece of information about a child’s life in school.