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Showing posts from November 6, 2016

When the Teacher Calls about Your Kid

As a teacher, I met lots of kids who misbehaved from time to time. What was interesting was parental reactions. It boiled down to two types. When presented with an instance of a child's disruptive actions, the helpful parent said something like, "That won't happen again." Most of the time, it didn't. Unhelpful reactions took several forms: "It's not true." - I'd walked into the girls' bathroom and seen their daughter with a lit cigarette in her hand, standing in a cloud of smoke. (I must have misunderstood, or maybe I need my eyes checked.) "Someone else started it." Frequent reaction to fights. "It isn't that big a deal." - This was in reaction to her son peeing on another kid because he wore ragged clothes. She actually said, "He's just a ___", naming a local family living in poverty. "Other kids did the same thing and got away with it." This excuses your kid's behavior how? I co