#1: Choose Your Position
The way parents understand their role will dramatically affect the ways you respond to your student’s behaviour, performance and attitude. We are all to familiar with the stunt-double parent who finds themselves awake at 3 am completing that assignment on the planets while their child sleeps peacefully; or the robotic general who barks orders from afar only to learn that Gen Y is actually just code for “incapable of obedience”.
Now, I am not a parent (I hope), and therefore I do not pretend to be an expert on what are sound parenting principles or not. However, in my time, I had sat around many, many kitchen tables with sobbing students and parents – both at a loss about what approach to take, and dealing with the consequences of thinking about things the wrong way. So let me humbly suggest that when it comes to your student (as opposed to your child), you adopt the position of “coach”.
Why might that be a helpful metaphor for modern parents? Partly because these days having a Personal Trainer is a lot like a having a Hawaiian shirt in the 70s – you just don’t leave home without one. With life coaches and business coaches and personal trainers our society is thoroughly familiar with the position these people have in their respective contexts. A helpful dictum is “on the sideline, but not in the game”. It articulates the fundamental elements of this position.
You see, the coach lives every high and every low, they often make the hard decisions for their understudies, the help formulate the plans and aid in every way they can – except that they are always just millimetres off the playing green, standing there on the sideline.
Let me encourage all you brave parents who have at once the most rewarding, wonderful yet profoundly difficult job in the world. Might you consider the ways that you can respond to your student’s academic life as a coach – helping them to strategise and plan; making tough decisions for them (such as eliminating their distractions); fighting to stay informed of the state of play – for a good coach knows their players and the challenges they face well; and finally, that you stay on the sideline, granting your student their opportunity to shine.
