Working With Parents
Working With Parents
Love: Be sensitive to the moving of God's Holy Spirit through your life. Remember you are a tool that God desires to use. Keep the love of Christ foremost in your thoughts and attitude.
Accept: This perhaps is the key to all else; the accepting of the parent as they are, the accepting of oneself, the accepting of children, the accepting of the situation.
Respect: When parents tell of their innermost thoughts and feelings, they are showing a trust and confidence in the teacher that suggests great watchfulness that will never be betrayed.
Advise: People don't actually want to be advised, they want SUPPORT. They want a chance to explore and talk about the things that are most urgently pressing; to gain relief; and then come to their own decisions and possible solutions.
Be Truthful and Honest: Parents appreciate a teacher who can be depended upon to tell things as they are, the pleasant and the unpleasant; a teacher who is reliable, and who never tries to put anything over on them.
Don't Be Authoritative: Remember that parents can do their own thinking and deciding about what is best for their child and that there is never just one right way of doing or solving problems.
Be Empathetic and Understanding But Not Sentimental: Empathy will carry with it the acceptance of the way parents are thinking, feeling and doing.
Honest Admiration: Be always ready to speak honest admiration for what the parents do. Parents can usually use plenty of encouragement. A word from the teacher can be a big lift.
Do Not Condemn or Blame: This is a mark of real maturity when you can accept parents without judging them. Communicate together with the parents with little antagonism or resentment.
Shock: Try not to let the parents know that you are shocked at whatever is said. Respond to surprises with Biblical prespectives.
Listen: Listening can be active, dynamic and vital. The very willingness to do it comes out of a feeling that parents have much to give. It indicates a belief that there is something to be learned from them and a readiness to learn. It speaks, more loudly that words, of an interest in what parents have to say.
"We will not hide them from their children, telling the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength, and His wonderful works that he has done. For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make known to their children; that the generation to come might know them, the children who would be born, that they may arise and declare them to their children, that they may set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments; and may not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation that did not set its heart aright, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.