Teach Your Child to Be Their Own Advocate
There are many things that experts tell parents they ought to do for their child at the start of the school year:
*Help kids create a schedule to do homework and outside activities.
*Create a quiet work space for them to do homework.
*Make sure they get enough sleep each night.
*Insist they eat a healthy breakfast—even if they don’t want to-- because they won’t do their best work without it.
But one stands out as having especially far-reaching consequences: Teach your child how to advocate for themselves--starting with their teachers.
This may sound painfully obvious (the right thing to do often is but we still don’t do it).
But ask yourself how you talk to your children about their relationships with their teachers.
I confess that I have reminded my own kids to talk to their teacher about a lesson they didn’t understand, a grade they thought was unfair or a kid who was bothering them.
“Don’t forget to talk to” so and so, I’d say. And then I wouldn’t say anything else.
That’s not the same thing as helping them figure out how to respectfully approach the teacher and what to say to be sure they leave the meeting with what they need. It’s not the same as helping them practice with the right approach and appropriate responses.
And you can start as early as kindergarten. If, for example, a child gets a note home for poor behavior, ask him/her to explain/apologize to the teacher. Role play beforehand.
Teaching your child how to advocate for themselves from a very young age is a gift that will help them learn independence—something that by many accounts is less developed in young people today than in earlier generations.
With parents scheduling their children’s every waking minute, officials at colleges and universities everywhere have been bemoaning for years the immaturity of their freshmen.
A dean at Harvard University told me once that the cellphone had become the longest umbilical cord in the world.
It’s past time that we let our kids do more for themselves, and learning to negotiate their own relationship with their teachers is a great place to start.
Email me with suggestions to add to the above must-do list.
| September 8, 2009; 1:00 PM ET
Categories: Parents, Teachers | Tags: Parenting, Teaching Kids to Advocate
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