It’s a catchy title, ‘Parents Today’, an invite to go on a rant and share how society has changed and how parents are the problem. And, yes, this is a bit of a rant, but I want to start by saying this is a trend, not an issue with every parent… but it is indeed something I’ve seen more and more of.

That said, I’ve shared before, and I still believe that parents are our partners in education, and I believe it really does take a community to raise a child. And when we work together as educators and parents we can do great things. I’ve seen this in action. We had two sisters thrive at our school. One of them was able to train 20+ hours a week at her sport, still had time in Grade 12 to follow her passions, compose, produce, and sing an entire album of songs, and get high enough grades to get into the university program of her choice.

Her younger sister joined us and was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if she was enjoying herself. Then at the second PAC (Parent Advisory Council) meeting, her mom pulled me aside afterwards to have a private conversation. She got teary-eyed and thanked me and asked me to thank the teachers. She said that this was the first time in her younger daughter’s entire school experience that she wanted to go to school. She said school from preschool to grade 8 was joyless for her daughter, it was a chore to get her to school, and like pulling teeth to get her to say anything nice about her schooling.

She told me what a delight it was to see her daughter waking up and wanting to go to school. What a joy it was to have her come home and share what she was learning. How heartwarming it was to see her smile when she spoke about school. Her mom didn’t realize that this was equally heartwarming for me and my staff to hear.

We can get things right.

But in all honesty, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can have challenges where a kid struggles and we have to work together to make things better. And again, when we approach challenges as a team, we can often make things better. Not always, but frequently… and this is where the rant sneaks in. I’ve noticed that it could be a lot more frequent if it wasn’t for (some) parents today.

We have parents that overshare information and humiliate their children in front of us. They embarrass their kids with private details that makes the kid feel too ashamed to look to educators for support and assistance.

We have parents that blame educators for a student not learning something. Who expect every possible accommodation for their child, and literally expect us to take the challenge out of learning. They fail to see that learning doesn’t stick when there is no effort associated with the process. They’ll watch their kid spend hours on a video game to perfect a level, then the same kid will put zero effort into an assignment and it’s the educator’s fault because he or she doesn’t understand how their kid learns.

We have parents who see themselves as their child’s friend and advocate, and will not parent them when they need a parent. They will let their child have a device in their room so they can play games or socialize until 3am, then claim it’s too hard to get them to school in the morning. ‘Turn off the wifi? Take their device away? We couldn’t do that.’ Make them go to school tired to understand the consequences of their actions? ‘Oh, no. My kid needs his rest, he’d be too upset if we did that.’

We have parents defend their child, claiming they did the work themselves, even when it’s obvious that they cheated or plagiarized. ‘Just so you know, I was sitting next to her when she wrote that.’ Actually lying to protect them like that is some sort of favour. It doesn’t matter that the child can’t define several of the words used, or that all other writing done in a supervised environment is both structurally different, and reads as if it was written by someone with a weaker vocabulary.

In each of these examples, the parent thinks they are doing their child a favour. They believe they are being advocates. Meanwhile, rather than working with educators to help their child, they are adversarial, confrontational, and/or passively harming their child by not being a parent.

The rise in number of parents I saw doing these kind of things in my last decade of education was concerning. Parents will spend more time getting Chat GPT to argue a case for their child’s ‘defence’ than they will actually parenting their child, or listening to a teacher. They will hear only their child’s perspective and come into the school with metaphorical guns blazing to defend them when the issue was minor and could have been resolved with a simple inquiry. They will send a scathing email to a teacher, realize there was a misunderstanding and then send a meek apology or no apology at all when the small concern is cleared up… Then they wonder why a teacher’s future communication to them doesn’t seem warm and caring… and claim that the teacher doesn’t like their kid.

As a principal, no matter how upset a parent was, I always started a meeting thinking, ‘We are on the same team, we both want what’s best for their child/our student.’ I’ve had hard conversations with teachers, students, and parents as a result of those conversations.

But the hardest conversations where with parents who I had to walk on eggshells around because their child, who was not being a good student, was being ruthlessly defended… And anything I said to suggest their kid had work to do was dealt with as evidence that a collective ‘we’, everyone at school, was at fault… Meanwhile I had a team of exasperated educators doing all they could with a supportive lens.

Schools can still work when there is a kid or two with parents like this, but I watched their number rise. I saw the pressure it put on educators… especially after the challenges of Covid. We are at a time when kids need the whole community to support them, and I’m seeing too many parents work against rather than with the school community.

It’s these kinds of parents that are one of the biggest problems in education today.