Parents’ involvement in their child’s education is a key factor in the child’s scholastic success. It helps eliminate the cultural barrier that separates home from school.
The importance of involving parents in child’s education can be justified on several counts. First, parents have been rightly recognized as their children’s first teachers and role models. Experts suggest that parents’ attitudes and practices toward diversity influences and shapes children’s attitudes toward people who are different from themselves.
“Parents themselves are important teachers”, says Helene Goldnadel. Parents’ willingness to take the risks of displaying their own ignorance, when they don’t know something, working patiently to solve problems they face are some amongst the important part of teaching children. Playing with children and talking to them, even for a short period of time, is an important part of their learning. Trying new things is part of learning to teach. What a person knows is less important than what they do to find out new things.
When parents and children explore learning together, the experience of cooperation, family support, and excitement outweighs the problems of being tired, not having enough time and embarrassment. Education includes more than just being in the classroom. The information society requires more than basic education. It rewards creativity, the ability to work together, the ability to put information together in new ways, curiosity, questioning, and asking difficult questions.
Students’ participation in extracurricular activities like sports, school clubs, music, theatre is part of this development process and should receive as much support from parents as classroom work. Education often begins even before school i.e. at home. The demands of future work will place more emphasis on personal interaction and building close and collaborative interpersonal relationships which is almost a difficult task to achieve until and unless the same sort of environment is created at home.
Growing up has never been easy especially now in the new millennium amidst unprecedented prosperity, it has become more striving than ever. The cravings to know each and every fact of the existing world around him drives the inquisitive child to a stage of instability. During this stage the child cries for attention, help and love from the parents. This stage if ignored can prove to be lethal for the child.
Parents usually prefer to discuss only the career oriented issues with the child and rest of his cravings are considered as taboo. The child is always raised with pressures to excel in life. When children are young, parents marvel at their every little accomplishment but later the primal ambition left with the pushy parents is just to see their child topping the class. The grim epithet to the tormented lives of the children is the word ‘failure’. Sometimes the children express an inability to cope with the pressure to excel, frittering the dreams of their parents.
Examination fear, sibling rivalry, issues at school, warring parents, fear of punishment, distressed parents, divorce of parents are some of the prominent reasons roosting among the children which are making them vulnerable towards depression or a new world (without parents).
The escalating aspirations where the youth believes in achieving anything and the need of instant gratification makes the youth bully in nature. In such cases the refusals by the parents to accept the browbeating attitude of the child drives him away from them towards the world of destruction.
To safeguard the future of their child and to bridge the gap the parents have to bring a cluster of changes in their own behavior and personalities. The parents should ensure that the state of anguish being brought in the lives of their children by the inchoate emotional forces running rampant in the adolescent mind of the child should not go unheeded in any case or on the pretext of being a subject of taboo. Parents should also ensure that they are least absorbed in their own lives and career and try to spend the maximum time with their child.
On seeing their child scoring low or being flunked most of the parents are seen doing comparisons between their child and the other intelligent classmates of the child who scored the highest, such affronting creates despair in the child. Instead of doing comparisons, sermonizing the child to compete in today’s rat race and creating polarities, the parents should keep patience to hear and understand the child, entice the child for study and match the child with peer. They should try to ferret out the caliber of their child and help the child hone it up.
Some children do not want to grow up as they assume that adults have no fun in their life. They perceive all the adults in their life as stressed and permanently tired. Here too the parents should tend to talk to the child about what they enjoy by growing older, also to tell them that education is the best provision for the journey to the old age. Caring relationship has proved to be the most powerful disciplinary and learning tool for children. Parents have the most important and enduring relationship with their children. Children learn more from the home environment than any other thing.
Parents are the truest friend a child has, when trials heavy and sudden falls upon the child; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with the child during sunshine deserts him; when trouble thickens around him, still will parents cling to their child, and endeavor by their kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to the hearts of their child.
Being pragmatic the parents should establish a few family rules and should stick to them. If children learn to obey at home, it will be easier for them at school. Punishment for not following the rules should be non-physical. The follow ups of these little but primal elements in life by the parents and the teachers will not let the child get bogged down by anxiety, phobias, academic and socialization plights and can restore a happy life to thousands of children. These factors corroborate the statement that ‘the parents definitely have a role in proper education of their child’.