Can Teachers and Parents Get Better at Talking to One Another?

Families are more anxious than ever to find out what happens in school. But there may be value in a measure of not-knowing and not-telling.
Illustration of a teacher and a parent facing each other towering over a child.
Illustration by Maya Ish-Shalom

It was a weekday afternoon in the spring when my son’s kindergarten teacher got in touch about the ghost teen. During a social-studies unit about families, the teacher reported, my son had regaled his classmates with tales of his eighteen-year-old brother, who picks him up every afternoon at dismissal. I laughed out loud when I received this note, which was sent via ClassDojo, the messaging app used by our public elementary school in Brooklyn. My son has no brother of any age, and yet I could picture this brother immediately—I imagined him, for some reason, as one of the seniors from “Dazed and Confused,” leaning against his scuzzy, old Pontiac parked just outside the school gate, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, Foghat wafting from the tape deck. But the teacher did not seem amused. She asked me to talk to my kid about the importance of “being honest,” and to “review with him who is in his family.”

I felt reluctant about this assignment because, perhaps like many parents, I enjoy it whenever my son makes some edits to reality. It freshens my own slumped and desiccated imagination and offers a glimpse of his inner world—an alternate universe in which he has flown to Tokyo all by himself, designed a train that can travel infinity miles per hour, and built a robotic arm that can see the future. And it’s not like this fantasy big brother was an outlier: an unscientific sampling of my friends revealed numerous boys who had sisters but fibbed about having brothers, girls with brothers who fibbed about having sisters, and only children who fibbed about having siblings of any gender. Some told me that they added fake siblings to family drawings that they turned in at school. One child cut out pictures of kids from magazines and presented them as her kin. Another talked about her nonexistent little sister enough that her teacher congratulated her dad on the birth of his new baby.

Nonetheless, that evening, I put on my friendliest just-wondering voice to ask my son about his big brother. As I feared, he immediately recognized the question for what it was—an accusation by proxy—and denied everything. Trying to get him to come clean about a fib had begotten only another fib.

Sixty-odd years ago, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott theorized that some parents unwittingly foster a propensity for deceit in their kids by overreacting to benign acts of theft. When a very young child begins to comprehend that his mother does not belong to him, that she is not an extension of his person, the encroaching realization may launch a phase of stealing—taking coins from her purse, hiding sweets, and the like—as a kind of compensation for losing what Winnicott called “full rights over his mother.” “Parents who feel they must get to the bottom of these acts, and who ask children to explain why they have done what they have done, are vastly increasing the children’s difficulties,” Winnicott writes. The child cannot possibly explain the emotional internal logic of the act for which he is being scolded or punished:

The result may be that, instead of feeling almost unbearable guilt as a result of being misunderstood and blamed, he will become split in his person; split into two parts, one terribly strict, and the other possessed by evil impulses. The child then no longer feels guilty, but is instead being transformed into what people will call a liar.

This is a bit melodramatic, sure, but it usefully externalizes the melodrama that roils inside the head of a confused little kid. Shaming him for lying probably won’t turn him evil, pace Winnicott. But it won’t stop him from lying, either, because a child’s lie is usually better understood as a wish. Lie No. 1: I wish I had a cool older brother. Lie No. 2: I wish I hadn’t said that I had a cool older brother, because now I’m in trouble.

Joanna Faber and Julie King write about lies as wishes in their charming and highly useful best-seller “How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen,” from 2017. The co-authors are as adamant as Winnicott was about resisting the temptation to shame a child for lying, which they liken to “punishing a baby for pooping in her diaper.” Learning to lie is a significant cognitive milestone, marking a child’s early steps toward evolving a theory of mind—an awareness of what other people think or want or expect, what might please them, what might impress them. (My son later clarified for me that his brother drives a flashy Tesla, not a scuzzy Pontiac.)

“It’s a developmental skill to be able to say something that you know isn’t true when other people can’t tell,” King told me when I Zoomed with her and Faber recently. It’s also a sign of early empathy and decorum. “The socially adept child learns not to say, ‘Grandma’s pasta is disgusting.’ They learn to say, ‘Thank you very much, I’m full,’ ” Faber said.

Through a Zoom screen, King radiates compassion and attunement, and Faber is wry and delightfully discursive; both seem like the mom whose house everybody would hang out at after school. We talked about our kids, our childhoods, our parents. Faber said that she used to tell her mother that she was a dog. “I really wanted a dog, so I decided that I would be a dog,” she explained. Her mother—Adele Faber, herself a best-selling parenting expert—allowed young Joanna to keep a water bowl on the kitchen floor. Although her mother did draw the line at eating dinner on all fours, “she never said, ‘First you have to admit that you’re not a dog,’ ” Faber told me.

Introducing notions of accuracy and accountability into the innocent world of kindergarten make-believe “is a little grim,” Faber went on. “That’s the developmental age when we’re exploring our world and thoughts and relationships through fantasy and play. It’s being a kid.” The problem, in many cases, is not when a six-year-old spins a whimsical yarn. The problem is when an authority figure assumes that spinning a whimsical yarn is a problem.

If I had been a parent a generation ago, I likely never would have known about my Tesla-driving teen-ager. When I was a K-12 student, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there were precisely two reasons why my school might contact my mother during the day: when I (invariably) forgot my signed permission slip for a field trip and when I needed to go home sick. All other information and observations were consolidated into report cards and, in elementary school, annual parent-teacher conferences. Last year, in contrast, I received scores of phone calls and one-to-one texts from the school that my son and daughter attended. One was to report that one of my kids had felt a bit headachy and had gone to the nurse for a cup of water, another that one had mildly criticized a classmate’s art work, and yet another that one had spilled milk on the cafeteria floor.

In a national survey that was published in 2013, only four out of ten K-12 families reported receiving a phone call about their child in the preceding school year. But, when the coronavirus pandemic prompted a switch to remote schooling, parents of younger kids were often in near-constant, direct contact with teachers—to log attendance, submit classwork, and get help with assignments. After full-time, in-person learning resumed, the steady trickle of one-to-one calls and texts that I continued to receive from school—alongside the cascade of school-wide, grade-wide, and class-wide announcements on ClassDojo—seemed somewhat vestigial of COVID times.

There’s a sad paradox in the fact that the pandemic increased the amount of contact between many teachers and parents at the same time that it spiked the tensions between them. During remote learning, teachers could see inside their students’ homes, and parents could peek inside classrooms and at library shelves; neither group necessarily liked what they saw. Schools could make no COVID-era decision without worrying or angering many families, whether it concerned masking and testing mandates, closures, or hybrid-learning schedules. Some teachers believed that parents wanted to force them back into classrooms under unsafe conditions; some parents believed that wary teachers were malingering. (These ostensibly opposed groups heavily overlapped: most teachers are parents.)

When in-person classes fully returned, schools reported a surge in misconduct and emotional dysregulation in their under-socialized students. It stands to reason that these incidents meant more phone calls and text exchanges between school and home that could be awkward or combative. At the rightward political extreme, the disquiet and distrust between schools and parents helped prepare the stage for ginned-up outrage about critical race theory, sexually explicit library books, gender confusion, and grooming. Politicians and media have somewhat overstated parents’ over-all discontent with schools—recent polls by Pew and Morning Consult for the Times found that strong majorities are generally happy with their kids’ education. In a Gallup poll, conducted in August, thirty-five per cent of K-12 parents said that they were “completely satisfied” with the quality of their oldest child’s education, while forty-one per cent were “somewhat satisfied.”

But, even outside of the Moms for Liberty panic room, tensions continue to vibrate in subtler ways. Michael Thompson is a child psychologist, a school consultant, and the author of several best-selling parenting books; he began his career in education fifty-three years ago, as a middle-school teacher. “Over the last twenty years, parents have become much more anxious in their parenting,” he told me. “Parents are more there. This is the most devoted, most conscientious, most aware parent cohort ever—but they’re also wildly anxious.” For these parents, the pandemic was an anxiety factory. Then school went back to being a place where they couldn’t be there. “They think that the more information they have, the better their child’s school journey is going to be,” Thompson said. “That hunger for information becomes, at times, rapacious. Teachers know that. They’re giving them information to feed the beast.” If some parents feel as though they’re getting too much information, it may be because teachers are responding to these broader shifts.

Thompson is an easy laugh, bearded and merry—an effortlessly comfortable presence, as if a fisherman’s sweater had a doctorate in education. By the time our interview wrapped, I sensed, as I did with Faber and King, that he knew more about my son—or, rather, knew more of my experiences as my son’s mother—than my son’s teachers did. But I also sensed that this shouldn’t bother me: the well-meaning parent may feel that she is advocating for her child when she keeps close contact with a teacher, Thompson said, but, too often, “the more you call, the less the teacher feels trusted, and the more it corrodes a relationship.”

Meanwhile, kids themselves, once they get home from school, tend to shy away from feeding the beast. Most parents know the script: How’s school? “Fine.” “Good.” What did you do? “Nothing.” School is Fight Club; school is Las Vegas. “Children need to have a space that is their own,” Thompson said. Overinvolved parents “may think they’re always adding value, but often they’re undermining their child’s psychological ownership of the moment. The child is having the experience, but he also must be thinking about how Mom or Dad is experiencing it.”

The parent’s dilemma fits readily into a Winnicottian framework: the child losing control over his mother begins to steal, and the parents losing control over their child begin to hover and meddle. If we wish to add a bit of Winnicott’s flair for drama, we could also say that the child, lacking full possession of his school world, “will become split in his person; split into two parts.” By asking my son about his imaginary brother, I had caused him shame. I had intruded on a space that was private to him—or, more precisely, private from me. Perhaps his teacher, by making the disclosure, had already breached the boundaries of that space. She wanted my son to be honest about who is in his family, but, under this pressure for the truth, his trust in both of us buckled. We as adults needed to reconcile ourselves to a measure of distance and reticence, of not-knowing and not-telling.

Years ago, Thompson gave a talk to parents where a nine-year-old boy was in the audience. During the discussion, the kid admitted that he, like many of his peers, tended to be laconic about his day when he got home in the afternoons. Thompson recalled asking the boy why he wouldn’t share more with his mom: “He paused for the longest time. Then he looked right at me and said, ‘There’s not that much she can do about it.’ ”

But the body of research on teacher-family communication is not so fatalistic. In a 2021 study of a socioeconomically diverse group of elementary schools in Hawaii, participants said that the most positive and constructive exchanges between teachers and parents happened through informal, face-to-face conversations, of the kind that occur at drop-off or pickup or at school events—exactly the serendipitous and utterly normal social encounters made temporarily impossible by the pandemic.

A structural flaw in much teacher-family communication is that it is unidirectional: parents get information from school, however erratically, but they aren’t necessarily asked for information from home. “We know that when schools and families communicate in a reciprocal way, not just a one-sided way, children tend to have better academic, behavioral, and emotional outcomes,” Lisa Rafferty, a professor in the Exceptional Education Department at Buffalo State University, told me. Rafferty is a former special-education teacher with expertise in children who have emotional and behavioral difficulties—“invisible disabilities,” as she put it. Adversarial parent-teacher relationships sometimes stem from one-size-fits-all expectations that don’t account for what the teacher can’t see, Rafferty said. As desperate as some parents may feel to know more about what goes on at school, it may be far more important for teachers to know what goes on at home.

“If I were in charge of the world,” Thompson told me, “every teacher would be given the time and the compensation to visit every child’s home before the school year started.” Barring that, he said, teachers should ask parents three questions: Is there anything I should know about your child? Is there anything in particular that you are hoping for your child this year? And what are your worries? “These questions need to be asked and answered in person or on the phone,” Thompson went on. “A proactive question in person builds an alliance.”

And, as kids get older, there may be value in nudging parents gently to the side of the conversation. An elegant 2013 study arranged for cohorts of sixth- and ninth-grade students to receive daily notes or texts from their teacher, who also made daily phone calls to the students’ parents. The regular check-ins caused higher rates of completed, on-time homework assignments and lower rates of disruptive behavior. One ninth-grade teacher observed that students were “more eager to appear vulnerable in class”—a minor miracle amid the tough-guy posturing that is native to the early teen years. But Matthew Kraft, a co-author of the study, said that the calls from teachers to parents left some of the ninth graders feeling rattled, perhaps because “reaching out to their parents undercut their own autonomy.” With older students, Kraft went on, “teachers might benefit from directly communicating with students first, or in conjunction with parents, instead of going over their heads.”

Kraft, who is an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University, began his career in education teaching eighth and ninth grade in public schools in Oakland and Berkeley, including in a specialized classroom setting for kids at risk of dropping out of high school. There, he said, “I benefitted from smaller class sizes and the ability to invest time to get to know kids. That meant that I could make it a priority to communicate with families.” But manifold structural obstacles prevent most educators from creating the kinds of connections that are possible in a controlled research setting, Kraft said. Families may face language barriers. Schools often don’t have formal policies around parent-teacher communication, so expectations are unclear. Educators lack noninstructional time built into their day to make the calls and write the texts—elementary-school teachers may have thirty-plus students, and high-school teachers may have a hundred or more.

As a result, teachers triage—they get in touch only when there’s trouble, which conditions families to dread the calls rather than welcome them. Instead, Kraft said, teachers need to balance positive feedback with “specific and actionable” feedback about how students can improve. As Rafferty put it, “A parent shouldn’t feel their stomach drop every time they see the school’s number on the caller I.D.” (Mine certainly does.) “You have to make sure you’re not always calling home about what a kid needs to fix,” she went on. “You have to catch them being good.”

When I picture the classroom idyll that I would have wanted for my son last year, I see something that’s probably looser and goofier than the real thing, lower stakes, with more room for the fantasy and play that Faber and King talked about, more spots in the parking lot for scuzzy Pontiacs. In this kindergarten, I imagine Michael Thompson and my son improvising a “Yes, and . . .” story about the ghost teen’s high jinks. I imagine Joanna Faber pretending to be the ghost teen. And I could only ever imagine it, because, within this walled-off little garden, the ghost teen would be considered none of my business. Secrets are safe here. The spoken dialect is slightly different; the jokes don’t always travel. You will not see a parent pacing outside in a hallway or pressing her nose to a windowpane, because she trusts in things she doesn’t know, and her fellow-parents share that trust.

Ideally, if the teacher did find a spare moment to call home, the news bulletin would be brief. Kraft was careful and measured throughout our conversation, but, when I asked him what kinds of communication with families worked best in his classroom, he answered instantly. “A quick and unscripted, unexpected, positive message,” he said. “These families never got that, ever. Just call them up and say, ‘Hey, your kid worked really hard this week. Keep up the great work.’ That’s it.” ♦