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“"You don’t have kids, do you?” a parent asked me during my early years of teaching. She was right: I had no children at the time. I was offended, however, by the implication that my lack of progeny inevitably meant that my advice must be useless.
But it was.
It wasn’t my lack of children that made my advice useless. It was the fact that I had derived a solution to the problem (her child never turning in homework) that would work well in my world—not hers.
I’m not saying teachers need to be parents to be good communicators. We need to be empathetic. If I had thought more about what it was like to work three jobs (which I did in college) and try to carve out meaningful time to spend with the people you care about, I would have given that single mom completely different advice.
Over the years, I feel like I’ve improved at communicating with parents as I’ve made bigger efforts to put myself in their shoes. Here are the main things I’ve learned."
