Are you involved in your child's education?

The way parents interact with and collaborate with their child’s schooling has been shown to have a significant effect on their performance. Studies show that children whose parents play a more active role in their education, will do better overall! How your children perceive your role in school can strongly affect their performance, so it’s important to know how you can make the most out of your role and help your children become the best students they can be.

Perception Of School

Parents are major drivers of how children perceive school itself, and they must constantly take pains to underscore how important it is to their children’s future. You have to be careful not to paint school in a negative light with your words. Anything negative you say about school can potentially affect your child’s perception of how much effort they should put into it. It can be tempting to try and sympathize in this way when comforting your child about school stress, especially when handling after-school restraint collapse. In addition, when your child has a hard time or is making mistakes, you shouldn’t lay all the blame on the teacher or institution. It’s important to create an environment where mistakes are recognized and acknowledged, and most importantly learned from. This is the same environment that SISD seeks to create for our students. It’s also important to show interest in their life at school. You can ask them questions about their school day to show that you put importance on their experiences in school, and engage with them in meaningful, relationship-building ways.

Building A Learning Environment At Home

While parents might not be directly responsible for most of the knowledge that their children learn, they can cultivate an environment at home that can encourage studying, doing homework, and learning as a whole. One thing that you can do is enforce screen-off rules at home so that your children aren’t always distracted by their gadgets. You don’t necessarily have to ban their use – you can better encourage them to use educational apps or watch educational content. Part and parcel of this is helping them manage social media usage, which can be a distraction at best, and a potential bad behavioral influence at worst. Another is to help them develop efficient study habits, which will carry over to improve their time management skills not only in school, but in later life as well.

Cultivating Their Emotional And Relationship Needs

If a child is to make the most out of their education, they need to be equipped with the emotional support and the relationships they need to cope with stress. A lot of this actually comes from the parents’ side. It’s important for children to experience positive emotions, especially in their early years. At these critical stages of your child’s development, they need to feel good about themselves, and develop proper mental health states as well as positive outlooks. Parents need to provide a whole world of playful inquiry and promote happiness, not just dismiss these things as frivolous. For the later adolescent years, there’s also the need for parents to provide for their children’s fundamental relationship needs, as their children’s biggest supporters. Doing this is somewhat more complicated than just showing emotional support; teenagers are going through a lot in their lives, and the kind of support they’d appreciate isn’t always what you’d get from a direct approach. It’s also important for parents to know how to understand their teenagers in the first place. Every parent has been through the teenage stage, of course, but it can be easy to lose sight of what it was like to experience puberty and have wildly different goals and worldviews than one’s parents.

Building Character

With all that’s said and done about supporting and nurturing children, none of this is to say that they must be pampered and coddled. It’s essential that parents promote resilience in their children, to get them out of their comfort zones and help build their character. They’ll need to learn independence in a healthy way that will allow them to take on life’s challenges one step at a time. It will also be important to look out for children’s future after education. Career counselor is an equally important role of the parent that can’t be too hands-off, or too imposing in turn. Parents need to learn how to help their children choose their future careers, making a decision that will affect the path of education they’ll want to take.

The Role Of The School

Parents are far more important to their child’s education than they realize. Your efforts at home are essentially complementary to the work we do for your child in school. At SISD, we work on more than just knowledge of our curriculum. We provide them with the important skills that they’ll need to become productive members of future society and the workforce. We also create a pastoral care environment for them that will ensure their growth in character and maturity. All these apply no matter what your child’s needs are, particularly if they have special education requirements. We believe that education is a partnership. By working together on your child’s education, we can accomplish far more for them than would be possible alone. Your own actions at home, and the way you participate at school, represent important guidance for them that will amplify our efforts.