For you as parents, it is especially important to maintain contact with your child’s school, regardless of age. If parents’ evenings are attended regularly and if they also participate in important information evenings, parents are simply always well informed. Children are prone to the behavior “out of sight, out of mind”. Important dates are gladly concealed, emerging problems naturally likewise. This makes it unnecessarily difficult for the child and thus for the whole family. This does not have to be.
If the contact to the school and of course to the respective teachers is established early, you are always up to date. Above all, you can find out first hand where your child might be getting stuck, which subjects he or she is not doing so well in, or even if there are problems with the class community. People like to keep this quiet, too, because it is often embarrassing for the child. Talk to your child, make it clear that you do not intend to “gang up” on him or her with the teachers, but that a regular exchange is important and also right, so that he or she is optimally supported and can be reacted to quickly in case of problems.
Often, unfortunately, children first react downright offended when you as parents maintain contact with the school. So after the motto: “I tell you everything.” Therefore, conversations about the need to cooperate with the school are really important so that the child does not feel excluded or even misunderstood. For example, we’ve always handled it this way: at parent-teacher conferences, we always took our children with us. That way, we can talk to the teacher together and the child can also speak up again if there are any problems. This is fair, and the children accept it because they are there and don’t have to wonder at home what is being said about them.
Another advantage is that when the child realizes that you are always informed anyway, he or she will tell you more on his or her own and not keep so much quiet. It also learns early on to communicate properly and to admit problems. This really helps everyone. You often have the feeling that there are two worlds. At home, the children are lamblike and at school, they like to let the buffoon hang out or tend to behave rudely. It will also think twice if you are always on the pulse of the school. In this way, they learn early on that you are in the know, that they have to control themselves, and the teachers are also relieved a little. The biggest problem is really, we heard it often from teachers, that most parents obviously don’t care about school at all. This can have fatal consequences. Character education falls flat, behavior is often below par and so are the grades. It is not about absolute control, but about turning children into polite, capable and communicative people. The best way to achieve this is to keep in touch with the school at all times and to have a good exchange with the children about this. School is not a world that does not concern parents, but the future of your child.