The more I understand about how children learn the more I realize how important parents are in helping children succeed in school. At first I believed that teachers were the most important people in terms of a child’s learning. After all, they are trained in how to teach and how to help children learn.
Then I believed that parents and teachers had an equal role in influencing a child’s learning. I discovered that a few teachers believed this too. These teachers were usually the ones who had plenty of contact with parents, mainly kindergarten teachers who met parents when they brought their child to class.
Now I believe that parents have a much bigger influence on a child’s learning than teachers. In fact, I have come to understand that teachers cannot teach a child well unless a parent has prepared the child for school type learning.
Now, I am a slow learner, it has taken me many years to get to develop my beliefs and to feel happy with them. I need proof that my beliefs are based on a sound foundation. Even then I am reluctant to throw away old beliefs and accept new ones.
So what made me change my mind? Why did my beliefs change? It was a mixture of experience and research that changed my mind.
While I was teaching and working with parents whose children were struggling to learn it became obvious that some parents were better at helping their children learn than others. Some parents seemed to have a reasonable understanding of their child’s struggles to learn and were willing to try and do something about it. Other parents, no less loving and wanting to help their child, had very little awareness of the struggles their child was going through and had no idea how to provide the help their child needed.
You can guess which child made the most progress.
Then I carried out my research into how parents help children learn. I met some amazing parents. Parents with little formal education but with an understanding and an awareness of their child’s learning issues, parents who were teaching their children sign language to help them overcome language issues, parents who were helping children publish their own books as a way of developing their writing. Amazing stuff.
I also met parents who wanted to help their child learn but who had no idea what to do. Parents who were spending vast amounts of time, money and energy trying out ways to get help for their children. Most of the time the support they were paying for was either useless or even damaging to their child’s learning.
So I gradually came to understand that it is what parents do that has a bigger influence on a child’s learning than what happens in school.
Parents rock!
YOU make the difference.
What are you going to do about it?
How did
