Equip Schools

#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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 10:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.