School as a Family: Strengthening Bonds for a Successful School Year

Note: As I write this piece, it is not forgotten to me that for some parents, the summer continues to be a difficult time around childcare. For some parents, the need to pay high rates for camp to just work continues to be a conversation around the lack of accessible and affordable childcare. Taking time off work is a privilege that not all parents are able to have. Therefore, as you read this blog, take the pieces that will work for you and your family.

As we bask in the summer holidays, enjoying our time with family and friends outdoors, school is not exactly on anyone’s mind. After ten months of going to and from work, school, activities, and just surviving the winter’s wrath of illnesses, what our minds and bodies need is to enjoy and chill over our summer vacation. That being said, it can be helpful for parents to be mindful of ensuring some sense of structure and routine. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t relax and see where the day takes us, but part of us having rest is to also engage in activities that help us feel well. 

How do we manage the stresses that will inevitably occur as we transition back to fall with our children heading back to school? We can look for the answer in our summer routine and the conversations we have with ourselves and our children.

Setting Up for a Stress-Free Back-to-School Season

Summer is a great time to look at what activities give us a sense of contentment. For us as parents, it could be looking at how we engage in activities that help our own well-being. For some of us who struggle with work-life balance, the summer is a great opportunity to take a break from work and engage in other outlets. It can be doing things with your children that you may not have been able to do during the school year, like going to the park, having a picnic, or going to the library (all activities that don’t have to cost extra money!). Or it can be going out with friends that we haven’t seen in some time to reconnect with the importance of social well-being. It can also look like cooking at home and making more meals that give us energy that fuels our bodies, vs. our go-to takeout night (nothing wrong with getting pizza or takeout! Work is long, the commute even longer for some, and we need to feed our families). 

For our children who may have those extra days out of camp, perhaps it’s about spending more time being physical, getting them outdoors, and helping them practice downtime: think reading, and doing crafts vs. screen time. These activities can help us all feel well in supporting and building our foundation of well-being before the busyness of back-to-school in September. Therefore, it’s important to look at what activities we can engage in to help us feel well and incorporate them into our summer routine.

Keeping an Open Line of Conversation

Conversations we have with ourselves as parents are usually reflected in how we speak to our children, regardless of the topic. When it comes to any transitions, it’s important to first look at how we speak to ourselves regarding the upcoming transition. Whether it’s back to school, moving into a new community, or having a new baby, the self-talk we engage in can either be helpful or unhelpful.

Take some time to reflect on some of these questions as they relate to back-to-school.

• “How did the past school year go for my children/me?”
• "What are some things that went really well this past school year for my child/for me?” 
• “What are some things we can continue to work towards together as a family in the coming school year?”
• “How have I been managing my own well-being this past school year?”

These questions are designed to help us reflect on the school year as a family instead of focusing on the individual child. If we see school as a family experience, it helps our children to not feel alone in navigating difficult experiences year after year. The Western school system is designed for very specific type of learners, and if our children don’t fit within those parameters, school can be very defeating rather than empowering. 

School as a family experience helps our children know that they’re not alone. When we start reflecting on our views of what went well, what areas of growth are needed, or how well we were managing our own well-being as parents, we can start shifting how we see ourselves, our children, and school through different lenses. This can help parents have a more realistic and helpful self-talk, which will be reflected in how we speak to our children. This, in turn, will help our children craft better ways of managing their own self-talk about school. We don’t need to avoid talking about school if it hasn’t been a positive experience for our children or for us. Having these conversations throughout the summer helps us and our children to prepare to take on what the school year will bring – whether positive or negative. 

To further bring this concept home, think about when you were a child in school: was there a time you felt alone, uncertain of what the school day would bring, whether it be academic or peer-related? Could you have felt more secure about the uncertainties if a caring parent or trusted adult had been available to help you navigate those uncertainties? Would you have felt safe and secure knowing that you could lean on that trusted parent or adult?

As parents, and specifically for those of us who are immigrants or children of immigrants, we may see school as another community raising our children and adopt a “what they (the school) say goes” mentality. As immigrants, sometimes we trust that educators and school staff will do their part, and we can do our part at home. This complicated home-school dynamic can be seen at best as parents trusting educators and at worst as educators seeing it as “hands-off parenting” and avoiding responsibility. The cultural differences between Western education and Eastern parenting can lead to conflict and misunderstanding, and our children get caught in the middle. 

Therefore, part of managing the back-to-school transition is to not only talk about structure and routine, and the self-talk we engage in as parents, but also to learn to do school as a family.

To do so, keep the following in mind: 

• Always Check Your Own Well-Being: If you’re recognizing that you’re not doing well, reach out and get help.
• Support Your Children’s Well-Being By: listening to their worries and concerns about school, whether it’s about social relationships or the difficulties around learning. Validate their worries by empowering them to self-advocate when they need help or have them identify a safe adult at school to reach out to when you’re not available. For tangible worries about things like math or reading skills, you can help them prepare by taking time in the summer to work through some of these worries.
• Support Your Children’s Well-Being By: helping them envision a preferred school year. What would that look like? What do they need to do? What can you do to help them get there? Working together on this can help children feel secure and grounded so they know they have a safe base to return to after school.

It is also important for immigrant parents (for all parents really!) to start building a relationship with our children’s school if we haven’t done so.

Elementary/Secondary: Communication with the homeroom teacher (or the various subject teachers for the semester) is crucial and can start as early as September with a quick email introducing yourself and setting up the home/school relationship as a joint effort to support your children. This preventative effort helps parents have a relationship with the teacher. Being proactive instead of reactive, both at school and at home, further supports the “school as a family” experience. This can further help children in knowing what to expect for that school term because you know what to expect as a parent!

Post-Secondary: Although this blog may seem like it’s geared toward younger children, young adults in post-secondary education can also benefit from what has been discussed above. Parents of young adults can further support the transition to post-secondary by doing the same things around having meaningful conversations about moving and attending school away from home. The key takeaway is to further cement the importance of self-advocacy and knowing how to reach out for help when they’re met with school and life challenges. Post-secondary students continue to struggle with mental health and well-being at an alarming rate. Having conversations with your adult child can help them continue to feel secure in doing school together as a family, even if they move away from home. Though you may not have the ability to connect with their faculty members (and I would highly discourage parents in problem-solving for their adult children when it comes to academics!), doing post-secondary together as a family can look like talking about the transition, going to the college/university together a few times before the move and looking at health and academic support services or social/recreational clubs available on campus. It could also be looking at other community support, such as local places of worship, community groups, cultural groups, etc., that they can further join as they move away from their home community. These things can help your adult child prepare for back to school.

As parents, we continue to do our best. We may not be able to do everything for our children and be perfect, but our children (and our young adult children) don’t need us to do everything for them or be the perfect parent. In fact, it be more harmful than helpful if we continue to solve problems for them. They just need us to be that available, safe, secure, and validating base that they can continue to come back to when they’re met with life’s challenges – at school or otherwise. 

*For more information on how to better support yourself and your children, review school mental health resources that can help you feel more empowered as a parent in navigating parenting.

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