Teaching Parents: How We Understand Children

Parents, how do you understand your kids?  Honest question, with a very unclear answer.  How do you figure out the best way to be a parent?  It seems you can’t.  Your child isn’t even born yet, how could you possibly know how to be the best parent to the kid?  Maybe it’s impossible to tailor yourself to the future, but I believe it is possible to better understand the youth in all its forms.  The answer: go back to school.

I wish new parents would spend time in school.  Not night school, but around children.  Not just middle school or high school or elementary school, but every type of school.  Public or private, parents need to be around kids.  The reason why is simple; we understand more about people we share experiences with.  Being around kids of all different age groups would help you know what a kid is like, what kids are doing, what they want to do.  Being around kids is getting to know them.

“But I’m bad around kids”.  I’ve heard this around college, around the workplace…people thinking that they aren’t the best thing for kids.  Not that they are bad role models, they just haven’t found a way to be around children.  My response is be around them.  Children love to teach adults about what it means to be a child.

Has this been a problem, not understanding our children?  Of course.  There are kids in this country who don’t know about our government.  There are kids in this country who don’t care about anything more than getting to the next level of Halo.  I personally don’t care if a student is not the brightest, or the strongest, or the fastest.  But the desire to learn more about the world, the emotional capacity to live in this country as a productive member, we aren’t born with it.  We learn how to be good people from our parents.  And parents are duty-bound to honor this, to become teachers of civility, of society.  Parents are our first teachers.

I’ve spent the last two months teaching high school English.  Not a long time by any means, but the experience has been illuminating.  I have had some great students so far, and teachers that floor me almost daily with their abilities.  They aren’t worried about one or two kids, but twenty.  And they do it with integrity and intelligence.  We need parents like we need teachers.  Compassionate, with just enough discipline to make sure our students stay on the right path.  So parents, be teachers.  Be around kids.  The best teachers, are always learning.