RPMS: Parent Involvement
October 20th, 2022
Parent and Student Partnership makes the Dream Work
Her education became a very important of my life, especially as I dealt with her ever changing personality changes.
This newsletter is going to give you real-life tools and examples of why your Parent involvement is essential at every phase of your child's development.
From: (Action for Healthy Kids Website). What does parent involvement look like?
- Encourage your child to apply what they learn in school to real life situations to help them grasp the importance of what they are being taught.
- Be positive! Maintain positive attitudes about the school and education in general.
- Respond to your child’s academic struggles in an empathetic and supportive way, and frame them as an opportunity for growth. It’s OK to not be good at everything, so it’s about helping them find their strengths and what they respond enthusiastically toward.
- Check in with your child’s teacher and attend parent-teacher conferences, family nights, and other events. Make sure communication goes two ways.
- Stay informed about your school’s policies around things like health and wellness, discipline, social emotional learning, and more. You may find areas of weakness that are good starting points for advocating for change.
Staying Involved: 10 practical things you can do to maintain a good relationship with your student.
Parents have a lot of responsibilities. They have to keep up with the mandatory things to keep the household intact. Working parents have to divide their time between their job responsibilities and also providing a healthy environment for their children and other family members. If you're a single parent, then there is a double duty that takes over your life. Maintaining a home is not easy and it does not matter what your marital status is. Parents may be struggling with stressors that impact the amount of time they can spend with their child(ren).
So how does a busy parent keep up with their child's education? From my personal experience as a single mother, I can tell you that it can be challenging. I sacrificed a lot of my personal time to be with my daughter and dedicated a large percentage of my personal time to her. It was challenging over the years when she had sports or other academic programs that I had to provide transportation for.
So these are the rules that I made for my household to hold the peace.
1. Do not fight or argue with your children first thing in the morning. Make a list of things that you need to talk to them about in the afternoons/evenings, but do not argue with them first thing in the morning. This causes a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress for you and your child. They come to school upset and their whole day is affected by the bickering in the morning.
2. Know who their teachers are. Have their names and emails in a document that you keep so that you can email them if necessary.
3. Keep up with the calendar of when the report cards go home. Knowing when to check their grades keeps you alerted to the academic issues that they may be having. Sign up for the parent portals so that you can check on their academic progress when needed and be able to communicate with their teachers.
4. Know the friends that they are hanging out with.
5. Make one day a week special family time: Watch a movie together, Cooking Together, Going to Church Together, Going to museums or special programs. **"When my daughter was small, I would often take her to the Kennedy Center for special children programs--many of them free.
6. Attend after school fun functions so that your student knows that you are interested in them and in their academic school life.
7. Pick your battles: Not every argument should be a declaration of WAR. Not every BATTLE should lead to the WAR room.
8. It's ok to apologize when you have lost your temper. Know when to take a time out as an adult. I would often call a family member to come and pick up my daughter when she and I would be having a hard time together.
9. Make up quickly--One of the things that often happened in my household is that when my daughter and I would argue, I would be quick to apologize for my part of the situation and also try to make up quickly. It helped our relationship and I would listen to her when she felt that I had crossed her boundary.
10. Create boundaries with your children and family members. This can look very different among our families. The key is to make it work for yours, but boundaries lead to respect among the members of the family and it also leads to clear expectations.