Smarter and Stronger Parents

“You need a license to buy a dog or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt reamin’ asshole be a father.” – Keanu Reeves’s character “Tod Higgins” in the movie Parenthood

I was a public school educator for 35 years – 25 working for a urban school district in Texas and another 10 serving as a non-profit director for a group committed to improving low-performing schools. Over those 35 years, it became plain to me that many parents just “didn’t know what they didn’t know.” It wasn’t as if they didn’t love their children, or wanted to take care of them, or stick up for them when they were in trouble. They just didn’t know how to be a parent.

Hell, I didn’t know how to be a parent when our first child came along. I remember the night he was born when my wife and I stayed up most of the night just staring at our little baby, listening to him snort and turn, wondering if he was breathing ok to make it through the night. It was only after the nurse reassured us that our little one was just “snoring,” much like adults do when they sleep, and that he was going to be ok that we relaxed and settled down to sleep by our baby.

My wife and I, like many new parents, sort of learned “on the job,” using what we saw our parents do to us (not always the best training manual to rely on!,) what we saw other parents do with their children (again, maybe not the best training out there,) or trying to not make the same mistakes with our second, third, and fourth child as we did with our first.

As a school leader, I often thought we would be better served as teachers, principals, and other school staff if adults had some sort of “school” they needed to attend before becoming parents. A place that would pick up where “baby classes” left off. A place where parents learned how to set goals for their kids, how to access the right resources to help their children receive the right type of support growing up, how to pick a learning spot that was just right for their little one.

Last week, The Atlantic published an article titled “Why Don’t We Teach People How to Parent?” The article was written by staff report Faith Hill and starts out this way:

“There are just some things you don’t do without preparation. You’re not meant to drive a car without taking lessons and passing a test. You aren’t supposed to scuba dive without certification. You can’t teach – or practice law, or therapy, or cosmetology – without first proving your knowledge. But you can become a parent without any training at all – and that’s a pretty high-stakes position.”

“Parents today arguably face steeper expectations than ever before. Over the past half century or so, ‘intensive parenting’ has become the norm in the United States: Child care, for many families, has turned into an all-consuming and hyper-expensive affair, not about just nurturing kids but cultivating them, with tutors and ballet and piano lessons. (Not every parent can afford to meet those standards, but even so, the majority aspire to them.) Advice books proliferate; TikTok influencers preach the benefits of different ‘parenting styles’; moms and dads now spend significantly more time with their kids than they did in the 1960’s.”

“But they aren’t necessarily better equipped for the job. The ways that people used to learn parenting have started falling apart, and the alternatives are not accessible enough to fill the gaps left behind. American society hasn’t embraced the idea that child-rearing can or should be taught formally. Meanwhile, many parents are struggling to figure it out for themselves.”

…

“Today, many people become parents without knowing much about child care at all beyond what they saw their own parents do. Kids spend more and more time in structured activities led by trained adults, which means fewer opportunities for teens to babysit. Home-economics classes are less common, they’re almost always elective rather than required, and they ten to deemphasize child-rearing in favor of ‘consumer science’ – say, cooking for a food business, according to Dorian Traube, the dean of Washington University in St. Louis’s social-work school, who studies childhood and family health. And the old sources of communal parenting wisdom are disintegrating: Not only are families shrinking, but congregation membership and trust in doctors are in sharp decline.”

…

“As plentiful as parenting advice is, structured, formal education is harder to come by, despite the fact that it’s linked to good outcomes for families. One research center’s literature review found parenting-education programs to be associated with more empathy, sharing, and helping among kids, and less aggression and hyperactivity; another program found that after attending a class series, parents reported that their children were more willing to follow rules, and they themselves felt better able to listen, play, set limited, and deal with parenting stress.”

…

“One obstacle [to parenting classes] is simply funding. Legislators and educators tend to have what Traube called a ‘scarcity mindset’: They assume that making classes for everyone would be impossible, so they limit them, understandably, to certain populations – such as young or low-income parents, or parents who have had many children in a short amount of time, or all of the above. ‘For those multiply-stressed families, we tend to have some good resources,’ Traube told me. ‘But the threshold to meet that’s pretty high.’ The result is usually that the least wealthy families get more access to parenting programs, and the wealthiest ones can afford to hire nannies or other help, but a wide swath of people in between have no one to turn to.”

“When parenting education becomes associated with a low income, Traube told me, that can end up both stigmatizing the courses and unfairly treating poverty as a proxy for being a bad parent. It doesn’t help that parenting courses are also sometimes mandated after child abuse or neglect. Even when classes are free and easy to sign up for, many people just don’t think of them as a resource to casually take advantage of.”

If we ever invent a new system of learning for our children, parent education should be a component part. Not only can a new system of learning make our young learners smarter and stronger, it can help the parents and families of those young learners become smarter and stronger too.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB