The Parent/School Relationship

How the school's expectation that I enforce their rules at home led to my decision to homeschool.

In my first post about our decision to homeschool our kid, I explained (at length) how much he disliked school and how sad it made him. What I didn’t talk about as much, was another aspect of the situation that I’m only now coming to terms with: how much the parent/school relationship was harming our parent/kid relationship.

a happy kid, learning in nature

I recently listened to an episode of the Exploring Unschooling Podcast, a resource Colin and I have both found really helpful as we’ve tried to figure out our approach to teaching our kid at home. In the episode, a woman describes the incident at school that led her to make the decision to homeschool her own kids, even though she was a teacher herself.

The incident revolves around her kid misbehaving in some minor way at school. During a meeting with her son’s teacher, the woman is told about this incident, and assured by the teacher that he stopped the behaviour because she told him that if he stopped, she wouldn’t call his mom to tell her about it.

Listening to this brought me back to a similar incident that we experienced last year. About halfway through the year, our kid’s classroom got a second teacher who came in for an hour each day to work one-on-one with the kids who struggled with group learning. Within a few months of spending a daily hour with her, our kid went from not reading at all, to being one of the top readers in his class. I was thrilled.

That is, until the day I got a call from her. My son was with her, crying in the background. She recounted a story about his inability to focus or pay attention to the day’s lesson. I struggled to understand why she was calling me. It didn’t sound like anything had happened, but he was clearly upset. I talked to him, reassured him that I loved him, and then got back on the line with her. Had something happened? No. There was no incident, other than the fact that he wasn’t in the mood to sit still and work with her that day, and was a bit more stubborn in his refusals than usual.

Slowly, it dawned on me that she was calling me to “tell on him,” and had brought him to see her do it. He was incredibly upset, and she was using me as a threat to get him to comply.

I spent many hours last year calling and emailing my kid’s school and advocating for him. But in this moment, in this phone call, I was too stunned to be able to coherently reply.

This teacher either believed that I would want to reprimand or punish my child for not paying attention, or she didn’t believe that at all, but was intentionally making my child believe it, in order to frighten him into doing what she asked. It was heartbreaking, and ghoulish.

I realized that in spite of our and his teachers’ best efforts to make it work, this was my whole relationship with the school system, in a nutshell. They expected me to be their proxy, to enforce their rules and to side with them against my own child. Constantly. It was harming our relationship, and I couldn’t see a way out.

My goal last year was to ensure my kid was happy and to cultivate his joy in learning, not to enforce a bunch of arbitrary rules that I neither care about nor consented to enforcing. And yet, here I was. Dragging him out of the house early because the school cared about him being late. Getting into conflicts with him about practicing reading and writing because the school sent work home. Listening to a teacher complain about him while he sobbed in the background. And, and, and.

We didn’t come to the decision to homeschool for another five or six months, but the seed of doubt that it would ever work out in the school system took root after that day.

With this journey, my goal is simple: to connect with my child and to strengthen my bond and my relationship with him. This approach is leading to other changes in the way I parent. I no longer have an antagonistic relationship to screen time, nor do I worry as much about his love of YouTube, video games, or other screen-based activities, because I’m right there with him, diving into the funny videos and scary games and having a great time. I have little desire to push him to stick with activities he doesn’t love. I spend more time trusting my kid, and less time forcing him to do things that neither of us gives a sh*t about. I watch him learn every day, without tears.

So far, it feels like the best thing I’ve ever done.