How much should I be doing to support my child’s learning

September 29, 2008

I have a confession to make. I’m a school teacher. There we are – out in the open. Best to be up front about these things from the start. But not only am I teacher, I am a proud father of four. So, if you’ll permit me, I’ll don both hats for the duration of this short article which, if you haven’t already guessed, is about the dilemma which we parents face everyday: just how much educational support should we be giving our children over and above what they get up to at school?

I shall, of course, resist the temptation, as a teacher, to say, ‘NONE! Leave it to the experts. We know what we’re doing.’ For not even doctors, lawyers or rocket-scientists would claim that they have all the answers all of the time. And teachers don’t either.

As you might imagine, as a parent and a teacher I have attended more parents’ evenings than I care to mention. I’ve discussed the education of sons and daughters with thousands of mums and dads, and almost all of them begin with the same opening gambit:

What can we do to improve our child’s performance at school?

There are so many options aren’t there? – so many things we could be doing: we could clear the shelves in Waterstones of every home study guide on mathematics and spelling; we could save up and pay for a course of private tuition, each session shoehorned into the tight space between school and cricket practice; we could surf the net for educational games and study sites; we could sentence our little one to summer school; we could even create cash incentives for exam success.

There are so many options we could try – but that does not necessarily mean that we should. Ask any publisher, private tutor or educational website developer and they’ll tell you there are huge gains to be had when you invest in their services. The home/school market is a vast and very lucrative one. I too have written many educational books (although mostly for use within school), and I run an educational consultancy, so I know there is money to be had. I am, it seems, in danger of doing myself out of some very nice business by offering the advice I am about to offer, but…..

..as a parent I can’t help thinking that my role is to provide the kind of support that you cannot find in a study guide or in a classroom. My job – my reason for being on this planet, in fact – is to preserve the health and happiness of my children and to give them the best start in life. And the best start in life means: knowledge and opportunity at school; hugs at home. That’s it.

I do not wish to denigrate the role of a parent. A hug represents so many things, from caring and cuddling to feeding and cleaning, and from listening and chatting to disciplining and directing. A hug is an all-encompassing term.

And hugging is not always easy work. For the hug to be of benefit, the hugger must always be strong, dependable as oak, unwavering, or else the huggee will fall away, adrift. And so our job as parents is to be the rocks around which our children may anchor themselves.

Sometimes it seems like our society – and its obsession with testing, monitoring and recording – is turning our little boys and girls into old men and women before their time. Surely our job is to shield our children from this kind of stress, whilst enabling them to face up to the challenges ahead from a firm and steady base.

It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Just hug them. Of course it is far from simple; it is a complex, multilayered issue, fraught with self-doubt and constant questioning. If happiness comes from doing well at school then I am not fulfilling my duties unless my children are all doing just that – and ‘doing well’, as our society dictates, means good grades. Bad grades means poor achievement, which means misery – which means I’ve failed as a parent… quick, where’s the number of that private tutor. I need reassurance. And in any case, what is wrong with investing in some expert tuition, or buying some study guides from Waterstones? Aren’t I just trying to preserve my child’s happiness, ultimately?

A dubious argument. If you are like me, you are actually trying to appease your own conscience for failing to show enough interest in their homework, or missing a parent’s evening, or working late and missing story time. By throwing extra funds at your child’s education you think you can demonstrate how much you love them.

Again, a spurious argument. Your conscience needn’t be so stained. You are working hard to make ends meet, and provided you can offer hugs at regular intervals, you are fulfilling your role. No amount of intervention into your child’s education – albeit for the very best of reasons – will bring guaranteed benefits to their health and happiness. But hugs do – guaranteed.

The anxiety that we feel as parents about how much we are, or are not, doing to improve our childrens grades at school has a demonstrably negative impact on the very thing we are worrying about. In other words, we think we are helping by showing concern about our children’s academic attainment levels when really we should just be hugging them, no matter what.

In answer to those many parents, every year, who ask me what they can do to improve their children’s grades, I say this: hug them and remind them that you’ll still be there to cook them fish fingers if they come home with a D.

 

by Andrew Hammond, Founder of English IPS, the first interactive educational resource site for teachers, pupils and parents in the prep school community

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