It is officially Handoff SZN.
Parents everywhere are waving goodbye to school buses and feeling the reverb of slamming doors in carpool lines. Depending on how the morning has gone and how young their kids are, parents may wait until the kids are out of sight before they express their glee. After all, they now have their lives back for at least four hours a day, five days a week. If their kids are older there’s no need for the facade. Tweens and teens are well aware that their parents have been counting the summer days until they have their snacks all to themselves again.
Though my kids are now adults, I vividly remember the back-to-school rituals of preparation and sending – new outfits, wandering store aisles looking for the right colored folders, signing permission slips. Those details felt so important then, and they are. Rituals are important because of the meaning we assign to them and communicate through them. With every labeled pencil pouch and each new haircut we are whispering, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
The cultural mandate to set our children up for success by sending them off well to school is so universally understood that it does not need to be spoken. We just know. In fact, for families that may not have the resources to wander big box store aisles marking off outsized supply lists, communities have created calendars chock full of back to school events that serve to reinforce the idea that this handoff must be done right at all costs.
The problem with this approach is that we place so much importance on schooling in our culture that it sometimes stands as a proxy – a poor one – for the more important gift that we are responsible for bequeathing to our children: education. Ancient wisdom teaches us that the responsibility for children’s education is centered within the home. At its best, schooling supports education but it cannot replace it. They are not the same thing.
Every family has values and hard-earned wisdom worth passing on to the next generation. Most often, these are lessons that schools are not qualified or equipped to teach. So while we do all we can to pick the right schools and angle for the right teachers, we as parents (and grandparents and aunties and uncles and caregivers) have a responsibility that is impossible to hand off: teaching our children the priorities, values, and life lessons that will anchor them in years to come. This home-grown curriculum will far outlast their memories of lessons learned in their classrooms.
And so, at the start of this new school year, I offer some principles that my family picked up along the educational journey. These are lessons we learned together with our kids as we navigated the anxiety-producing twists and turns of their K-12 schooling journeys. I offer these lessons not as a model but as a gift to inspire your own.
There’s no shame in getting help.
At a certain point, my husband and I had to come to terms with the fact that we could not manage our lives and our kids’ schooling at the same time. Helping them stay organized, confirming their work had been done, checking the online system for assignments – the multiplicity of tasks became overwhelming to them and to us. The solution we settled on was to contract with a tutoring service to help fill in the gaps. That decision was difficult for me because I thought that as an educator – with a doctorate, no less – I should be able to manage my children’s academic careers without assistance. But as I reflected on how many families do not think twice about investing in supports to help their children meet schooling goals, I breathed easier. The principle of seeking help from professionals – with the associated humility and sometimes the financial layout – is one that translates into multiple areas of life and serves the multitasking parent (and student) well. With the increased availability of free homework help websites and hotlines, it is easier than ever to model healthy help-seeking that will serve our kids well as they encounter new and overwhelming situations.
Try different things until you find what works.
Our family holds the unintentional distinction of having engaged nearly every form of schooling that exists. Our children attended a public neighborhood school, a public magnet school, several private Christian schools, and were even home schooled through our state’s virtual school option. The reason? Not only were our children different from one another in terms of their academic strengths and challenges, but at different times in their lives, their needs changed. For instance, at one point they attended a school that served preschool through twelfth grade. It would have been easy to keep them there until graduation but we came to realize that the school’s culture was not a good fit with their personalities or our parenting approach. So we began to experiment with different options until we found one that was sustainable given their learning styles and interests. This idea of being flexible in approach has carried forward into their adult decisionmaking, helping them adapt to change and challenges in creative ways.
Take action. Speak up. Resist.
My kids still talk about The Email. About once a year, they have a conversation with someone about it and ask me to forward it to them so they can prove that the story is true. I call it my “momma bear note” to the principal of their school in response to racist content being taught in a class. After the strongly but politely worded email, my child reported back to me that the teacher had changed his mind and pulled the content. That experience taught and reinforced multiple lessons – the power of action, parents’ oversight role in the educational process, and the centrality of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as values those in leadership are responsible to embody. These are lessons that continue to shape our kids’ perspectives on issues that matter.
Trust but verify.
As soon as our children hit the stage in their schooling where they had more than two teachers, cracks began to appear: completed homework assignments that were missing, random papers exploding from desks and backpacks, grades that did not reflect their intelligence nor their potential. Thankfully (for us, not necessarily for them), these developments coincided with technologies that allowed parents to log in online and see everything from grades to syllabi to teachers’ websites. We no longer simply took our kids’ word that they had turned everything in – our approach, as my husband put it, was to trust but verify. That strategy served our family well as we navigated schooling and other issues. I like to think we’ve passed it down to the next generation. Time will tell.
I will always show up for you.
Parent engagement looks many different ways. It is not always being at the PTA meeting or planning the class party. I admire parents of athletes who automatically know where they are going to be at least one night a week during their particular sport’s season. Our kids are both musicians so instead their dad and I found ourselves at choir concerts, talent shows, and performance competitions. Not all of their endeavors were school-based: Our conspicuously middle aged selves could be seen posted up during acoustic sets at dimly lit house shows or sneaking into the back of youth services to show support. By showing up, we were teaching security and worth, helping our kids to solidify their identity as people we loved and valued enough to change our schedules.
Your education is my responsibility.
As parents of Black children, we had to supplement to fill gaps in their education. Through conversations at home, visits to cultural sites such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, celebrating Kwanzaa, our choice of books and art, and intentional exposure to historical and cultural content, we did what we could to shape our kids’ views of themselves and the world in alignment with our values. Like all intentional acts, this does not just happen. It is work. But it is good work that influences who children become and how they think about themselves.
Purpose over performance.
Ultimately, both of our kids ended their high school education at an arts magnet school. Their confidence that music was central to their purpose helped them endure a rigorous academic curriculum. Their passion for creating music fueled and gave meaning to other parts of their lives. It was a necessary but sometimes difficult realization for us as parents that the quest for academic performance drove us but not them. We have grown as parents to marvel at how deeply our children’s God-given purpose has been ingrained in them and how distinct it is from what was perhaps our unspoken ambition for them. For both of them, a sense of purpose has shaped their trajectory, making use of their schooling but thankfully not overshadowed by it.
What your children learn from you during their school-aged years will be different from what our kids learned from us. Your children’s lessons from home will be shaped by your experiences and your values. That is as it should be. The wonderful thing is that, if we are intentional, we can even educate our children using lessons shaped from the rubble of our mistakes, failures, and flaws. None of us are perfect or have perfect families but a little intentionality in a handoff culture goes a very long way. Seeds we deposit into our children’s souls can grow to feed generations.
A final note: Some of us carry school-related trauma that makes us question whether we have anything of value to offer as our children’s educators. No matter how your schooling journey turned out, find confidence in this: There are some things that only you can teach your kids. And as it turns out, those are the most important things for them to learn.