Parent-teacher conferences aren’t that exciting for me. Ours are coming up later this month. You sign up if you want one, it isn't mandatory and most people sign up. I do too sometimes, but I've never come out of one with information that changed anything.

My kids behave at school, they don't get in trouble, nobody has ever pulled me aside about anything. I could skip it entirely and the year would go exactly the same way.

I still go but for a different reason now. 

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I DON'T ARRIVE WITH QUESTIONS

I’m not the one to prepare or the parent who turns up with a list and run fifteen minutes over while everyone else waits. I mostly go to meet the teacher and chit-chat.

I want a sense of who the person is- how they talk, what they are expecting and whether they're warm or brisk or funny because for the next nine months, my kids are going to come home and tell me things about this teacher and if I've sat across from them for ten minutes, I can decode it. I know whether "they were really strict about it" means something actually happened, or just means they’re a strict person in general.

The meeting is context for a year of secondhand stories.

THE RELATIONSHIP THAT MATTERS ISN'T MINE

Also, in my opinion the important relationship shouldn’t be between the parent and the teacher. It's between the kid and the teacher.

The more I insert myself into it, the less of it there is. This is clear by the time they're older. My eighth grader has seven different teachers, one per subject, and there are barely any conferences at that level. We get a curriculum night where you walk around and meet everyone, and that's it.

What happens instead is that everything goes through him first. If he's stuck on something, he's expected to go to that teacher's office hours and ask. The teacher and student sort it out. If that doesn't work, then the kids can ask parents to get involved. (I hardly ever do though). 

I think that's a good system and he's completely at ease with it. He'll go, he'll ask, he'll handle it. It doesn't occur to him that this would be anybody else's job. 

WHICH IS REALLY A QUESTION ABOUT YOU

The point to remember is that any kid can handle these situations if given the right freedom.

I've watched kids hit twelve or thirteen and struggle badly with this. The responsibility gets handed to them and they've never held it before,  their parents were in the details of everything, every assignment, every instruction, every week - so when it arrives, they've got no idea what to do with it.

The involvement you choose at eight is the independence you get at thirteen. Nobody tells you that at the time, because at eight it just looks like being a good parent.

There's research that says roughly the same thing, and more bluntly than I expected.

One APA paper is actually called Learning to Let Go: it measured how direct involvement parents have while a child is actively working on something, and found that over-engagement predicted poorer self-regulation later. The mechanism is almost mundane, step in before they've struggled, and they never build the strategy, so it isn't available to them later when you're not in the room.

They can't practice it while you're doing it for them.

So the conference isn't really where you find out about your child. It's where you find out which parent you're being. You can tell in about five minutes from what you brought, what you're anxious about, whether you already knew the things you're being told.

WHEN YOU DON'T AGREE WITH THE FEEDBACK

The other thing conferences occasionally produce: a teacher tells you something about your child you don't recognize at all.

When my older one was younger I got he can't sit still, he struggles to stay calm and I said yes, that's exactly what he's like at home too. No surprise, nothing to dispute.

But I know parents who've been told their child has real behavior problems and thought: “no, absolutely not, he'd never, you must have him confused with someone else.”

The only useful test I know is the pattern. Is every teacher saying this, or is it one teacher, one time?

One teacher once let it go. Remember they're managing twenty-five children at wildly different levels, all day. It is not an easy job.

Every teacher, year after year that's the moment to actually look at it, however much you'd rather not.

Another one that comes up every autumn.

My younger one has a stricter teacher this year and I think it's genuinely useful for kids to get one.  One year you have the warm, funny one and school is wonderful, the next you get someone exactly opposite and it isn't.

That's not a problem to solve. That's a preview of every workplace they'll ever be in. By college you've got a dozen professors, everyone hates the same one, and you get on with it anyway.

A kid who's only ever had teachers who suited them hasn't learned anything about adapting to people. A kid who had a hard year with a strict one and came out the other side has.

A Note for My Fellow Laid-Back Parents

If you're sitting in a conference at the end of this month feeling vaguely guilty that you don't know as much as the parent who went in before you, you might not be behind.

Meet the teacher. Get a sense of who they are, and go home.

You've got nine months of stories coming, and now you'll understand them.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

P.S. If you've got a conference this month, try asking one thing: is he coming to you when he's stuck? Whatever the answer is, it'll tell you more than grades will.