Parents And Educators: War Or Cooperation?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The quarantine has exposed problems in family and parent-child relationships, which are exacerbated by distance learning of children. Parents give us a full range of protective responses to this stress, from denial to overcontrol. In this case, what should teachers do to make training effective? How not to succumb to parental manipulation and stay calm? Let's find the answers together!

Now the information space is filled with the words "stress", "illness", "death", "crisis", "hunger", "survive", "help", if you analyze news from leading news agencies, it becomes scary and you start to feel the approach end of the world. When this negative flow of information passes through the parent's consciousness, it is aggravated by the stress of being in a confined space, the need to manage the learning process of children, fear for the future of the family and the problem of building relationships with teachers in new conditions. As a result, we get overly anxious, neurotic parents.

In order to help parents and teachers, I decided to conduct a survey, developed online intensive courses and selected materials for independent work.

I like the unfinished sentences, so I came up with a few of these suggestions for conducting a parenting survey with my clients and other parents, for example, from groups in WA. I ask you, too, to think and complete these sentences, and then read the article to find out the opinions of other parents.

1. Self-isolation for me …

2. The big world has come to our apartment …

3. Distance learning….

4. When I do homework with my child …

5. In terms of distance learning, I …

6. I would like to tell teachers …

A few words about the psychological defenses that parents began to manifest in the context of distance learning. As we remember, psychological protection is a reaction that helps to keep our fragile psyche from destruction, somehow explains what is happening to us, helps to appropriate information and attach it to the existing one. The key words here are: “save”, “explain”, “appropriate”. Thus, in most cases, a person's connection with the world will remain, and he continues to live. In psychology, there are different approaches to the phenomenon of "psychological defense" and, accordingly, classification. I correlated the words that parents used in the survey with the description of psychological defenses and assigned them to certain categories.

I do not pretend to be strict scientific conclusions, as I conducted “home research” in order to find means and methods of helping clients, but I can note that the parents gave different reactions from “denial” to “catharsis”, that is, “no crisis and there is no virus, so let the children go to school”,“I forget or confuse the time of the teacher’s airing, I don’t follow homework”,“I don’t want to hear about the lessons!”,“The teachers are resting, but we have to work there is no Internet at home, then we will make up for it,”“all the time I yell at the child, I would kill him!”,“instead of lessons, it would be better to be creative”,“I understood a lot, it’s not about the teacher..”and so on.

Thus, teachers found themselves in a difficult situation of interaction with parents who actively defend themselves. Of course, in conversations with me, teachers talked about these parental reactions. The key word in the monologues was "resentment", resentment against parents: "they do not help me," "they do not appreciate my work," "they do not cooperate," "there are many complaints and discontent," "they don’t work with children," and so on. What should a teacher do in a distance learning situation? It is clear that teachers are faced with difficulties of a different plan: methodological, technical, organizational, psychological, and they need different specialists to help them.

1. Acceptance of the situation as agreement with what is happening.

2. Creation of a harmonious emotional state (attending workshops, webinars, on-line trainings).

3. Being in the position "I am an adult" when communicating with parents.

4. Show flexibility and use different strategies in a conflict situation (cooperation, compromise, rivalry, avoidance, adjustment).

And now to the survey results.

In general, parents noted the positive aspects of self-isolation: "new opportunities", "communication with the family", "the opportunity to learn", "gives a lot of new information", which suggests that the process of adaptation to new living conditions is going well. The same applies to the second sentence, as well as the parents noted that “now they are part of this big world”, “found a place in it,” “discovered it,” and so on.

Distance learning 85% of parents called “poor quality”, “difficult to understand”, “discouraging children”, “leading to social savagery,” only 15% noted its positive aspects.

The fourth and fifth sentences prompted the parents to talk about the difficulties of learning: “I find it difficult to explain the material,” “I myself cannot understand anything in the textbook,” and about negative feelings: “I want to cry from powerlessness,” “I am angry with myself and the child,” to teachers: “they ask a lot,” “they don't want to explain,” “they don't answer questions.”

Many parents, completing the last sentence, wished the teachers health, take care of themselves and their children, patience, family happiness, early vacation and professional success, and also sympathized with them.

Summing up the above, we can state that the situation of distance learning has posed new challenges, created difficulties, but at the same time opened up new opportunities. And now the choice is before each of its participants: to fight or to cooperate. What would you choose?

I wish you harmonious relations with yourself and the world, dear friends.

Your Elena Stankevich