Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from
Understanding Independent School Parents: An NAIS Guide to Successful Family–School Relationships, by Michael G. Thompson and Alison Fox Mazzola, published by the National Association of Independent Schools, 2005.
Tolstoy may have claimed that happy families are all alike, but we psychologists know that each family is different. Because they are such complex social systems, families do not easily invite comparison or understanding. To a greater or lesser extent, they are closed to the outside world. There is much that we do not know about families other than our own and we may have a hard time visualizing or conceptualizing how another family works. When that family contains one of our students, the mystery can deepen.
Some years ago, I was talking to a teacher about a high school girl who was developing anorexia nervosa. As is typical with anorexics, the girl had lost a lot of weight without the parents noticing. The teacher said to me, "I don't know how this could have happened. In my family, we all had dinner together every night. My parents saw everything we ate." The teacher had difficulty imagining a family that did not sit down to dinner together most nights of the week. The truth is that there are many families — healthy families — who don't have dinner together. But this teacher just could not picture such a family.
Faced with great differences between our families and other people's families, we often fall into judgment, disbelief, simple incomprehension, or mockery. We all do it. "Look at them!" "Can you believe what they do?" "Aren't they weird?" As Jane Austen, an acute observer of families wrote in her novel, Emma: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
I want to offer teachers a way of thinking about families that will allow them to step back from judgment and take a step forward to better understand and enjoy families different from their own. Every teacher should know more about families because what children experience in their homes determines how they relate to other children, to adults, to academics, and to schools. You cannot understand a child's school difficulties without understanding the child's family and his or her place in it. Once again, Jane Austen got it right when she wrote, "Nobody who has not been in the interior of a family can say what the difficulties of an individual of that family may be."
The family is the single most powerful influence on a child's life. It is a total institution in which the child is raised, and it cuts off the child from the outside world as completely as a convent or a prison. A family has its own rules and rhythms and rights and wrongs. Children do see examples of things being done differently than their family does them. But their love and loyalty to their family make the idea of doing things differently — at least the important things — inconceivable. As children, we all believe that the way our family operated was the right way. The discovery that our family's ways might have been strange comes along in adolescence and later life. Children embrace their family's style as their fundamental reality. And they attempt to remain loyal to their family style when they come to school and are confronted with a variety of ways of being and behaving.
Psychologist and teacher Jean Piaget wrote that when a teacher stands up in front of a class of 30 children and says something, it is heard in 30 different ways. Piaget was referring to differences in the cognitive developmental level of students but his observation is equally valid with respect to a child's experience of a teacher and the tone and tempo of a classroom. Every teacher is taking 30 different children, or however many there are in the room, and trying to mold them into a family — like unit called a class. The trouble a teacher experiences in that task has everything to do with a stylistic clash between his or her own ways of doing things and the habits of the families of the children in the class. One family is very tight and disciplined; the parents and the child from that family find the classroom a bit loose, a bit too open. Another family is relaxed and laid-back; they find the classroom a little too uptight and rigidly structured.
FAMILY STYLES
In an early research study on functioning, normal families, therapists David Kantor and William Lehr found that all families differ on six dimensions: the use of time; the use of space; the characteristic energy that the family displays; how and by whom power is exercised; the predominant affect of the family; and the family's sense of meaning (what I prefer to call "identity.") If you think about these dimensions, it becomes obvious that some families care about being on time and keeping a very neat house while others don't care much about punctuality and the children's toys everywhere. Some families chug along steadily with a sustained energy; others fluctuate through periods of calm punctuated by periods of wild activity. Some families are happy-go-lucky, at least as much as life will allow. Other families define themselves in very serious terms.
It turns out that these obvious differences are evidence of three underlying "pure" types of families, according to the data Kantor and Lehr collected. Families tend to conform to a "closed" type, an "open" type, or a "random" type. Of course, these are statistical findings; there are no actual pure type families. In the real world, all families are a mixture of all three. But the research found that families do have predictable styles and values.
"Closed" families have a tight boundary around them that separates them from the outside world. You don't just drop in on a closed family. These families exercise power in a top-down way, with the father customarily the "boss." They value preparation, unity, sincerity, and clarity. Open families, by contrast, have a less formidable barrier around them and tend to value tolerance, authenticity, latitude, and responsiveness. Random families are dramatically different from closed and open families. Their use of time and space are likely to be dispersed, irregular, and fluctuating. They value ambiguity and whimsicality; above all, they want to protect the originality and creativity of their children.
As you read about these three styles, have different families you have known come to mind? You might have pictured certain families from your school or some from movies. The Sound of Music, for example, is about a "random" character, Maria, who is kicked out of a convent because she's never on time for Mass. She finds herself in a "closed" family headed by a former naval officer, Captain von Trapp. Over time, and with love, she gradually creates an "open" family where there is more latitude and, of course, harmony. Many family sitcoms on television portray families of a certain style. The Cosby Show was the idealized image of an open family where tolerance and resolution always carried the day. If you think about it, many families in theatre and art portray one of the pure family types, such as the creative, chaotic collection of relatives in Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You, a random family if ever there was one.
I have found that Kantor and Lehr's study helps me identify the underlying values and preferred style of functioning of the various families I encounter in my school consultation work. For example, a parent from a "closed" family might feel threatened by a progressive school, thinking it undisciplined and lacking in clarity. The parents in such a family might demand that the teacher assign more homework. I once consulted to a progressive school that had no doors on the classrooms; each one was open to a common workspace. Every year, a couple of families, ignoring the architect's intentional design of the building, would offer to buy doors — "closed" boundaries — for the classrooms, as if the school had somehow forgotten them or could not afford them.
A "random" family is likely to find a traditional school where students wear uniforms to be oppressive and see the uniform itself as antithetical to the whimsical spirit of its child.
Teachers, too, bring the lens of their family style to bear on schools. One visiting artist to the all-boys school where I consult portrayed the school, in her final work of art, as creating identical round, gray balls out of colorful lumps of papier-mâché. A boys' school that emphasizes discipline and preparation struck her as antithetical to creativity. I suspect she came from a random family; many artists do.
Every teacher had a family, and therefore has a characteristic style. Every teacher, like every child, grew up intimately acquainted with the values and assumptions of his or her family of origin. As much as we try to stray from our families, as much as we try to reinvent ourselves, we have been profoundly influenced by our parents and the setting of our family. The old axiom proclaims: "The apple never falls far from the tree." When we are young, many of us resent the implications of that piece of wisdom. It suggests that we could not grow up to be different from, nor avoid the failings of, the families in which we grew up. Some of us, this author included, tried to fling ourselves as far from the tree as we possibly could. In middle age, we are both humiliated and bemused to find that we're still pretty close to the roots and trunk of the tree from which we were originally launched.
Our particular styles, the way we exercise power, the tempo and rhythm and neatness (or lack thereof) of our classrooms, are always a testament to our family backgrounds. We, and the little worlds we create in our classrooms, are always part of a family style that still seems "right" to us because it is the one we know so well. It is always a shock when a child experiences our classroom, our use of power, or our tempo differently from the way we do or from the way we have imagined they would.
I was once asked to consult on the case of a third-grade girl who found her dramatic, big-voiced, expansive, and funny teacher to be quite scary. "That's impossible," declared the teacher, with her voice rising in indignation. "I'm not scary!" She certainly did not scare me, because I come from a highly dramatic family. Indeed, I found her energizing and delightful. But to a shy girl and her shy mother, that teacher was terrifying.
If you are going to work successfully with parents, you have to acknowledge and accept that there are many ways to be a family and that different families will produce a wide variety of children. Some of them will take to your style and some will not. It's as simple as that. Do children need to encounter and adapt to teachers who have different styles than their families? Of course they do. But you cannot expect that they will do so without some discomfort and friction. The first discovery on your journey to wisdom about families is to accept that the families that produce the children you teach are strikingly different from each other, and some are very different from your own. You are unconsciously as attached to your reflexive family style as they are stuck with theirs. You may want a neat, orderly classroom, but a child from a random family will find it unnecessarily structured and "fussy" in comparison to the flexible use of space at home. Irritation, misunderstanding, and outright conflict are inevitable when children from many families gather under the metaphorical roof of their third grade teacher.
FAMILY POLITICS
The second step to wisdom about children and families is to realize that students always bring their families with them to school, through their perceptions and behavior. We deal with our student's families by proxy whether we want to or not.
When they are in the classroom, children are also likely to recreate, or try to recreate, the roles they play at home. Kantor and Lehr described four recognizable "psycho-political" roles in a family, which they termed mover, opposer, follower, and bystander. These roles have nothing to do with being mother or father, older sister or younger brother. They have to do with the interaction of different personalities with one another over time and how they habitually play off against one another. In one family, the father might be the "mover"; in another, he might be a bystander. The family's mover takes the initiative and is always coming up with ideas for games and trips. The family opposer digs in, resists the idea, finds problems with it and is often passionately, but negatively, connected to the mover. The follower represents the family's swing vote. If the mother is the follower, she sometimes supports her mover husband but at other times throws her backing behind her opposer daughter. The bystander is the most loosely connected to the family. He or she does not, for the most part, participate in the family's heated battles. That leaves the bystander with energy for friends outside the family — activities that most family members may not like or understand. However, because he or she rarely cares about family decisions, when a bystander does feels strongly about an issue, he or she is likely to have a lot of influence.
What does this all have to do with the classroom? Common sense tells us a mover is going to try to recreate that role in the classroom, as will an opposer. The two are likely to meet and become antagonistic. Teachers tell me, "These two kids are always fighting, but they cannot stay away from one another. They keep seeking one another out." That's not surprising if you understand that they are recreating the roles they play in their families. And what about the bystanders and the followers? Accustomed to those roles at home, they may replay them in the classroom. The teacher intuitively tries to get a child who is a follower to be the leader sometime, or tells the habitual mover that it is time for another child to suggest a game.
Whether teachers are aware of it or not, they are always doing a kind of corrective family therapy, giving children opportunities to move away from their established family psycho-political roles. A mover at home gets the chance to be a follower during the school day; the bystander at home can try out her skills at initiation in her fourth grade classroom. Such opportunities help children grow. At times, of course, adults are induced by a child's behavior to enter into his or her family dramas; without knowing it, we play the role of some family member, sometimes in negative ways.
PARENTS' FEARS
One of the most surprising discoveries teachers make is to realize that parents are frightened of them — not every day, of course, and not all parents. Nevertheless, the fear is there. This latent fear, often denied and only painfully approached, can infect the relationship between independent school teachers and independent school parents. It can be difficult for a young teacher to see the insecurity in an older, accomplished professional person. It is only over time that teachers come to understand that insecurity is part and parcel of being a parent. Even the most powerful and accomplished parent fears the power of his or her child's teachers.
Can that really be so? I believe it can, and I have three reasons for saying so. First, parents have told me about their fears. Second, I have seen fear on the faces of parents who have never articulated it. Third, I am an independent school parent and I have always valued, admired, and feared the extraordinary power that teachers have over my child's life — and therefore over me.
As soon as my children began attending preschool, I found that I both appreciated the love that teachers lavished on my children and I feared their judgment of me. Why? Because I was an amateur struggling with the job that teachers do professionally every day. But the awareness of my limitations was only one of a number of fears that all parents bring to the parent–teacher relationship.
I have identified six fears that gnaw at parents when they come in to see their child's teachers.
- Parenting is inherently difficult and no one is experienced at it.
The first child in a family makes her competent parents feel helpless, and every subsequent child challenges parents in new and unexpected ways. As Anonymous once said, "Anything which parents have not learned from experience, they can now learn from their children." All parents are amateurs and they know it.
- Your child-rearing mistakes (and your character flaws) are on display through your child's behavior in ways you cannot know.
Every teacher, without exception, has drawn negative conclusions about the character of parents whom he or she has never met, based on the behavior of their child. It is impossible to be in a classroom without judging parents from a distance. Parents are aware of that. When my daughter was not yet three, my wife and I attended our first teacher conference with her gifted preschool teachers, Nancy and Vicki. After they had said many nice things about Joanna, there was The Pause that all parents dread. Nancy said, "You know, she is a terrible tease." My wife looked at me, and I looked at my shoes. There was nothing else to do. I knew from whom my daughter had learned to tease, because I had learned it from my father. My character was on display in front of my child's teachers: a very exposing moment.
- Every parent is trapped by hope, by love — and by anxiety.
Parents are unavoidably vulnerable with respect to their children. I had an anxious friend who, after her first child was born, called her pediatrician twice a day for about two months. Finally, the pediatrician's secretary called her and asked her to come in for an appointment (no mention of the baby). He sat down with her and said, "Mrs. Smith, you have given birth to a child. You have opened yourself up to a lifetime of anxiety. You have to pace yourself." I believe that all parents are pacing themselves with respect to their anxieties. And there are times when your worry breaks through in ways you cannot control.
- In important ways, you may not know as much about your child as your child's teacher does.
As our children grow older and more complex, they do not reveal all facets of their personalities to their parents. Adolescents, especially, show their teachers sides of themselves that they deliberately hide from their moms and dads. When parents sit down with teachers, they may have the uncomfortable feeling that they're missing a crucial piece of information — and they're probably right.
- Teachers have immense power over children's lives.
Teachers have the power and opportunity to praise, to support, or to criticize. Parents are keenly aware of teacher power, because as children they too had teachers who made them feel wonderful or terrible.
- Parents may feel trapped by and with their child's school.
Schools are not commodities and are not easily changed, even when things are going badly for a child. For reasons of geography, lack of good public schools, and the child's friendships (or the parents') there may be no other options.
If parents come to their child's school feeling amateurish, anxious, ignorant, and trapped, they naturally reach for the set of skills that make them successful in the "outside" world. Independent school parents usually have those skills in abundance, but when they're displayed in a school conference, these qualities can be unhelpful at best and destructive at worst. I once had an entrepreneurial parent come to me for help with his ninth-grade son. The dad made a business presentation about the boy that took up the entire hour we had together. It was an articulate, polished, forceful sales presentation. It made me want to shout, "But we're not buying your child. He's already here!"
To regain my patience with this business-oriented father, I had to remind myself that, at times of stress, lawyers act like lawyers (and sometimes make threatening statements), mental health professionals act like mental health professionals (and cannot stop analyzing everything and everybody), and so on. Even educators, when they're in a parental role, tend to make suggestions about the curriculum that irritate classroom teachers. Even when parents know that their skills are not appropriate to the educational situation, they cannot stop themselves. It can be difficult for teachers to remember that this behavior happens because of fear on the parent's part.
TEACHERS' FEARS
Teachers bring their own sets of fears to the parent–teacher conference — and they are the mirror image of worries that burden parents.
- Teaching, like parenting, is an inherently difficult job that is hard to measure and intensely personal.
You can never, like a businessperson, point to your "bottom line" and say, "My teaching is up 43 percent over last year." There are so many variables in teaching: the complexity of the students and the families they come from, the variation of learning styles in every classroom, the interpersonal chemistry among children and between the students and the teacher, the time of year, etc. You can have brilliant ideas, design the best lesson plan, arrive at the classroom full of energy — and have your class destroyed by an angry boy whose parents are getting divorced. No teacher has the power to guarantee the outcomes he or she wants. But when things do not go right in class, you cannot say to an unhappy parent, "You should have seen my class last year. It was amazing." This leaves teachers feeling vulnerable in front of parents.
- Teachers' faults are on display in front of the distorting eyes of children.
Teaching is a public, exposing job and the child audience is not always appreciative or kind. Teachers may not want to think about it, but they are discussed in many homes many evenings, and the discussions are based on the sometimes distorted impressions presented by children. So when a set of parents comes to talk to you, you don't know much about what they have heard about you from their kids — but you can be sure that it was not always what you would regard as accurate or fair.
- You teach well and effectively but you do not always get the credit you deserve.
A good teacher creates a setting where the children star. Parents are all too ready to see the child as the creator of success ("She's so brilliant!"), not the teacher. I think all teachers must wonder if the hard, often invisible work they do is going to be appreciated. The social critic Jacques Barzun has written, "Teaching is not a lost art, but respect for it is a lost tradition."
- Teachers are not accorded enough respect in our culture.
The fact that teachers are underpaid relative to other professions in a capitalistic society is a tangible sign of cultural disrespect. It is difficult not to feel that in a personal way. When you sit down across from a parent who makes not just twice or three times what you do, but 200 times what you do, it's bound to make you feel somewhat small. Many independent school parents, whatever their income, are high-status in a variety of ways. "What can I say to some of these important parents? I see them on TV every night," a young teacher in Washington, DC, asked me once.
I remember being a 25-year-old teacher at a school outside Boston, teaching psychology — including child development — to high school students. On parent–teacher conference day, into my classroom walked one of the parents, T. Berry Brazelton, full professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and best-selling author of millions of books on... child development. I must have looked terrified because Dr. Brazelton spoke first. "Don't worry," he said, "I know everything about infants and nothing about adolescents. Please tell me about my daughter." Not every prestigious parent is so willing to create a level playing field for a young teacher.
- Every teacher who has been in the profession for even a few years has been attacked by at least one parent. I ask the reader to remember the veteran teacher who, after describing a parent who had verbally attacked him 12 years earlier, said to me, "Every time a parent comes through the door, I wonder, ‘Could this be one of those?'" That teacher is a victim of what psychologists call "one-time learning." That one parent had made him slightly wary of all parents. I worry about this phenomenon, because I do not want teachers to generalize from one exotic and terrible parent to all parents.
- Teachers fear that parents' influence with school administrators means that their jobs could be at risk. One of the most damaging myths in independent schools is that parents, especially wealthy parents or board-member parents, can pick and choose teachers. In my 20-plus years in schools, I have visited only a handful of schools where I thought parents had that kind of power. When parents do have a say in personnel matters, it demoralizes the faculty and completely undermines the head of school. It is a terrible situation but it is extremely rare — and it never occurs in a school with a good teacher evaluation program.
MOVING BEYOND FEAR
I have worked with independent school teachers for many years and I have been struck by their sense of vulnerability about parents. The most obvious reason is that most independent school teachers, unlike their tenured counterparts in the public sector, have only a one-year contract. No doubt that is a factor in their sense of vulnerability, but I do not think it is the fundamental one. At the deepest level, I think that teachers are vulnerable precisely because they are full of feeling. Teachers must always be open to and, to a certain extent, identify with the vulnerable emotions of children. That openness, which I admire, can make a teacher appear "soft" when he or she is with a tough, bottom-line parent who wants his son in .
AP Biology so that the boy can go to an elite college — no matter how much his son struggled in previous science classes. The teacher is inevitably in the position of advocating for the child to the parent, and sometimes contradicting a parent who thinks he knows what the "real world" is all about or thinks of himself as a customer who must be satisfied. This can be a tricky position that leaves a teacher feeling out on a limb.
There are a number of ways in which teachers can get past their fear. The three most important structural cures are: good, strong administrative leadership; an effective teacher evaluation program; and a board of trustees that does not meddle or micromanage. If heads of school make it clear that they are going to protect teachers and they and their administrators do so visibly, the impact on teachers' sense of safety is palpable. If administrators do not provide the essential protection, teachers will fear parents.
A rigorous, professional evaluation program offers powerful protection for teachers. A good evaluation is a teacher's friend, so it has always baffled me why some teachers dislike evaluation. If you have two or three strong evaluations in your file, you have nothing to fear from an irrational parent. Your character, the ongoing quality of your work, and your history of success with students will be documented and can stand up to the idiosyncratic negative reaction of one parent or one child.
Finally, boards of trustees have to stay out of the hiring and firing process in a school. If they do not, faculty members will become demoralized and frightened, certain that their administrators cannot protect them — and they will be right. The school may appear to be stable and thriving but, over time, it will lose its strongest teachers; it will end up with only its most political and most obedient teachers, the ones who cultivate a following among parents and the ones who always trim their sails in response to parental whims and desires. If a board of trustees wants a strong school, it must hire a strong head and let him or her evaluate and protect his or her teachers.