Parent-Teacher Relationships

Richard Raney
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

Parents and teachers need to work together to create positive outcomes for students. Teachers need to communicate clearly and frequently to strengthen this bond.

Early in my career I read a study about the relationship between parents, students, and teachers. Surveys were conducted of all three groups and questions included “Who is most responsible for ensuring success in the classroom?” and “When something goes wrong, who is most likely to blame?”

The results were as fascinating as they were disturbing.

Students and parents agree the teacher is to blame when failures occur

If you’ve ever been a member of any sort of triumvirate, the survey results are not shocking. How many 3 bedroom apartments end up with 2 roommates ganging up against the third? Or try taking a cross country road trip with three people and see which one is no longer talking to the other two by the end.

As teachers, this three way relationship is especially tricky. Two of the partners, parents and teachers, have limited interactions with each other. The teacher-parent relationship is infrequent and there is ample room for miscommunication and suspicion.

It is difficult to manage, but teachers need to solidify their relationship with parents. To borrow from the world of wrestling, we need a tag team with parents to help students achieve.

Parents and teachers: ganging up on kids since the beginning of modern civilization

Unfortunately it can be difficult to build effective relationships with all parents. Our time is limited and preconceptions can damage the relationship before the first day of school begins.

Shields up parents — Parents can have had prior bad relationships with school and education. This is especially difficult if they struggled in school. School is seen more as an obstacle to overcome and conjures up negative associations and feelings. This leads to parents who send their child to school with their defenses up and ready to attack at the first sign of trouble.

Not another problem parents — Parents can view school as another source of problems in their life. Parents get phone calls when their child misbehaves or performs poorly. They see a mountain of paperwork and a flood of information from the school. They get to “help” their children with confusing and frustrating homework and projects. Life is already hectic and difficult to manage. Sometimes school is just another thing to juggle.

Whirring blades parents — Helicopter and lawnmower parents may view you as an enemy because you are a source of conflict in their child’s life. They genuinely want their child to be happy, and anyone who causes them discomfort must be stopped at all costs. This is especially difficult as these parents make bad decisions for what they believe to be good reasons.

“I noticed you gave our son a B- on his math test…”

While it is impossible to make all of the people happy all of the time, there are some common sense steps teachers can take to help form an effective partnership with parents and guardians.


Tips for Push Communications

Push communications include newsletters, blogs, and any other information you broadcast to parents. Few teachers enjoy writing a weekly newsletter, but every minute you spend working on your own is insurance that parents know what you are trying to do in class. Newsletters should keep parents abreast of goals in each subject and, if possible, give examples of the types of work students will be expected to perform.

When it comes to newsletters brevity is the soul of communication. This means no jargon. When a parent reads “This week I will be BAS testing your child to find their instructional reading level” the only information they are receiving is that you are purporting yourself to be an expert and hiding behind terminology. “This week I’ll use a short test to find out your child’s strengths and areas of growth in reading” gives the same information in an easy, approachable manner.

Realize that parents are drowning in information. If your school is like mine parents are getting emails from the district, principal, PTA, after school clubs, and any other instructors the student has. I tend to make my emails long, but I also put at the top of each email something that says “If you are in a hurry please read the bold words.” This gives an easy out to the folks who are checking their email at a stoplight and have 30 seconds to devote to my newsletter.

Assume that no one is going to click a link you send via email. If you email a link to your blog, Tackk, or WordPress I can guarantee 10%–25% of your email recipients are not going to take the time to click it. If we’re being realistic, most adults have learned to scan email and make lightening quick decisions about what is important and what gets trashed. If it takes an extra action to get to your information, you’ve lost readers.


Broadcasting information to parents frequently is great for crowd control. The more time you devote to communicating with all parent, the less issues you’ll have. Unfortunately, conflict will still arise.

Tips for Repairing Relationships with Parents

Begin with the end in mind. From the first chance I meet parents I start explaining what my goals are for students who leave my classroom. I want my students to end the school year thoughtful, eager to learn, and try new things. This means I push students and make them accountable for achieving age-appropriate goals. We need to advertise that what feels like the tyranny of the teacher is, in reality, the elevated expectations of their child’s coach and mentor.

Don’t just call or email with bad news. Can you imagine the dread a parent feels when they see an email with the subject line Your child today… Or when the caller ID shows School Name. Try to reach out with good news so that feeling of dread dissipates with each contact. Parents will love to hear their child did well on a project or worked well with others.

“And then your son ate all of the glue during art class…”

Explain why. If you give a child a consequence for their actions, explain why that consequence is important to their growth to the parents. Few teachers enjoy giving students a consequence; it usually ends up being more work for the teacher to apply consequences. We have communicate and explain that our actions are not the dictates of a arbitrary and power mad tyrant. We use tough love to help students grow, mature, and learn.

Ask parents what they want for their child. In the end most parents and teachers can agree on what the goals are. The friction in the parent teacher relationship comes from how we want the child to get to the destination.

During one especially difficult parent-teacher conference I was at a loss for words. The parents could not or would not see the overwhelming evidence that their child was struggling socially, emotionally, and academically. In their eyes it was everyone else who was failing their child; the teachers, the school, the student’s peers, and the community at large. I asked the parents “I want you to think about your child when they are 30 years old. They’re married, have kids, a job with bosses and coworkers, neighbors and friends… I want you to think of three adjectives you hope all those people would use to describe your child.” After a long pause they answered “honest, kind, and hard-working.” The only thing I asked after that is “do you think your child is on the path to those three words?”

That question started all of us on a new path of looking at that child together and thinking about what we needed to do to support his growth. It was still a rocky parent-teacher relationship, but it helped them to see that we needed to work together to support their child.


Our time as teachers is strained to the limit. It’s easy to think “I don’t have time to spend talking to parents.” However, I would encourage you to look at the time spent as an investment. When we invest in the parent-teacher relationship we create a united front and multiply the effectiveness of what we are doing in the classroom.

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