Disrespecting Teachers
Parents are Out of Control
By Daniel Muniz

Teachers often feel that too many parents are out of control. Instead of behaving as mature adults who are truly concerned about their children’s education, a number of parents are now openly hostile and downright vulgar and aggressive when they are having a discussion with their child’s teacher. In fact, the word “discussion” hardly fits the bill since oftentimes it is more of a confrontation.

Unfortunately, the reasons why some these mothers and fathers go overboard when talking to an educator is really at its very core the breakdown of civility and respect in our society regardless of what the issue is. There is a right way to handle a parent/teacher conference and then there is a wrong way. Sadly, too many people opt for the wrong method.

So how did parents get out of control?

There are plenty of reasons why people have lost their civility and respect but here are a few of them.

First is that too many people view teachers as babysitters instead of seeing them as qualified educators.

The result is these parents tend to assume that “all” teachers are not as capable or as intelligent as other professionals thus they are not taken seriously when their child has a problem or violates school policy. Even though the insight from a teacher about a child may be very valuable, especially when it concerns a serious problem, it is often immediately dismissed because parents do not respect the position of an educator.
 

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Another reason is that some individuals are obsessive with their offspring.

It is already happening in Little League baseball games, football games, and many other sports where certain parents are actually thrown out or even arrested at the events that their kids are participating in. They endlessly argue with the coaches and the referees with a passionate fury about what should have happened. These parents simply have unrealistic expectations about the performance and outcome of the games that their children are playing in so they lose their temper and self-control.

The same behavior occurs when these kinds of people confront teachers. All hell breaks loose because certain parents have an unrealistic expectation of what should be happening in the classroom. Just as parents cannot control themselves at a baseball field or in a gym, the same thing happens in a parent/teacher meeting.

In addition, some parents take it upon themselves to try to circumvent the teacher and beat the system.

And the reason this happens is because our educational leadership also doesn’t respect teachers. Educators practically have no leverage or input when it comes to the decisions of principals and superintendents. Some parents know this so if there is a problem, they will immediately go over the teacher’s head and directly contact the principal or the superintendent to resolve the issue. And all too often, the educational leadership is totally spineless when it comes to upset parents so they just give in without ever consulting the teacher about the problem.

In this case, the fault lies with the administrators because they choose not to treat their teachers as professionals thus they are allowing parents to manipulate the system. But most importantly, a bad precedent is set because a parent now knows that whenever there is a disagreement, they can simply bypass the teacher and go directly to the top to get it resolved. And the result is that these people then realize how little respect that school administrators have for their own faculty if problems can be circumvented in this manner, so they will just continue bypassing the teacher.

Another more ominous reason is that some children simply have bad values or none at all.

Kids learn a lot of bad habits from their parents so these habits present themselves at school. A grown adult may actually believe that there is nothing wrong with loudly swearing, cursing, lying, and throwing temper tantrums at home thus their children feel that such behavior is appropriate in the classroom. And if parents do not practice the universal values of honesty, integrity, responsibility, respect, and compassion, then their children are definitely not going to exhibit those traits at school, which will often lead to trouble.

Consequently, these parents do not understand that their own bad behavior is completely unacceptable when they are interacting with teachers. Needless to say, if they are unable to comprehend that their own children’s conduct is inappropriate, then they are simply going to believe that their kids have done nothing wrong. It has happened before all over the country. Students who are caught cheating on a test or fighting or engaging in any other bad behavior, more often than not their parents will stick up for them.

There are plenty of additional reasons to why some parents act this way but the source still points to the breakdown of civility and respect. A couple of generations ago, people had tremendous respect for educators which is not evident in today’s society. That respect has to be restored if teachers are ever going to have more control in their classrooms.

And most importantly, our educational leadership has to have the backbone to stand up to unruly parents instead of being scared of them. Spineless administrators will only help encourage more bad behavior of parents.

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