Not long ago, I was teaching a course at the Hispanic Bible Seminary. During a break, one of my students stayed behind at her seat instead of going for coffee, and she had a look I have learned to recognize over the years. It is the look that says the question is not about the material.<\/p>\n
Her child was in trouble at school. Complaints had come home, more than one, and she had read them carefully. And the child described in those pages was not the child living in her house. She was not being defensive with me. She was confused, and in the confusion, she was worried.<\/p>\n
If you have lived this, you know its particular disorientation. The report describes a student who is disruptive, withdrawn, three assignments behind, or walking out of class again. And at your dinner table, that same child laughs, does his chores, and asks for seconds. So you ask the question my student asked me: who is right, me or the school?<\/p>\n
Dear reader, I want to give you the harder answer, because it is the more useful one. You are both right.<\/p>\n
Children do not have a single, fixed way of being. They have a way of being in each place, and the two places are asking different things of them. Home may be asking for a calm dinner. School is asking your child to sit still for six hours, manage a hallway, handle a teacher who is short with him, and be near the people who make him feel small. Those are not the same demands, and they do not produce the same behavior.<\/p>\n
There are three reasons I see most often in my office for the gap you are living with.<\/p>\n
The stressor lives at school.<\/strong> If the hard thing is happening between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon, that is when it will show. Peer victimization is not rare, and it is not minor; twenty years of research links it to lower self-esteem, loneliness, and depression in the children who experience it. And for many of our families, the stressor has a specific shape. In a study of 173 Latino adolescents, experiences of discrimination from peers predicted more depressive symptoms, a weaker sense of belonging at school, and a stronger belief that college was out of reach.<\/p>\n That same study found something I ask parents to sit with. Familism, that deep loyalty and closeness we build in our households, was genuinely protective. Teens who held those values reported fewer depressive symptoms and felt more connected to school. But familism did not cancel out discrimination. The stressor still landed. A warm, united home is good for your child, and it is not a shield over the hallway. Both of those things are true at once.<\/p>\n Children report with behavior before they report with words.<\/strong> Young children, in particular, do not have the vocabulary for what is happening inside them, so they tell us through what they do. A four-year-old does not say “I am confused and frightened by the changes at home.” He throws something at another child at preschool. Teenagers have the words, but they are more likely to show distress outward, as irritability and conflict, than to sit down and name it.<\/p>\n Some things cannot be said at home.<\/strong> This one is painful, and it is not a failure of your parenting. Children read the room. A school social worker describes a sixteen-year-old whose close friend was killed; at school, he could not focus, left class, and watched his grades drop, while his mother reported that he seemed fine at home and did not need counseling. He was not fine. He had heard relatives at home make dismissive remarks about his friend and the way he died, so he had quietly concluded that this grief was not welcome in that house. Grief that the people around us will not acknowledge has a name: disenfranchised grief. It does not disappear. It relocates.<\/p>\n The same silence can follow a separation, a deportation, an incarceration, a move, or the arrival of a stepparent. A child in a new stepfamily often feels caught between loyalties and cannot say so to either household without betraying someone. So he says nothing, and his fourth-period teacher gets the information instead.<\/p>\n I understand the instinct to give it time. Children have hard weeks. But there is a pattern worth knowing.<\/p>\n Researchers followed Latino college students over six months and found that stress from outside the family did not stay outside. Higher acculturative stress at the first measurement predicted more cultural conflict inside the family half a year later, and that family conflict, in turn, predicted higher depressive symptoms at the next measurement. Pressure from school, work, and the neighborhood seeps in. It arrives at your dinner table on a delay.<\/p>\n The encouraging half of that study: family cohesion predicted less family conflict six months later. What you build at home matters. It simply works slowly, and it works better when someone is also addressing what is happening at school.<\/p>\n Almost every parent’s first move is to tighten. More consequences, fewer privileges, a stricter rule.<\/p>\n There is a case in the literature that shows why this backfires, and I use it often. A father brought his four-year-old to therapy for throwing things at preschool. The father’s solution was to impose a firmer punishment. What the therapist mapped was a loop: the father punished the misbehavior, the boy felt more alone and less loved, and the more unloved he felt, the more aggressive he became, which brought harsher punishment. The problem was never the boy or the father. The problem was the loop they were both stuck in.<\/p>\n Consequences have their place. But connection is not the reward you give after the behavior improves. Connection is one of the things that improves behavior.<\/p>\n And there is a second trap outside your house. Teachers who have not been trained to recognize a trauma response often read it as defiance, and the child ends up disciplined and removed from the classroom, which costs him the very instruction he is already behind on.<\/p>\n Two accurate reports of the same child tell you where to look. Here is what I would ask you to consider.<\/p>\n And one sentence to practice, because the first conversation sets the tone for every one after it:<\/p>\n “You are not in trouble. I want to understand what school is like for you.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Say it before you have the report card in your hand. Say it when you have nothing to accuse anyone of. A child who believes that sentence will eventually tell you something.<\/p>\n If the gap between home and school has lasted more than a few weeks, or if your child has been through a loss, a separation, or a frightening event, please do not wait for it to resolve on its own. A good family therapist will not simply treat your child in a room by himself. The approaches we rely on at Mosaic Wholeness Center, including Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, work on the cycle between you and your child, so that your child has somewhere to bring what he cannot bring to school.<\/p>\n Mosaic Wholeness Center provides counseling for children, teens, and families in English, Spanish, Korean, and Mandarin, in Rolling Meadows and Elmwood Park, and by telehealth throughout Illinois.<\/p>\n You are not being lied to. Neither is the school. You are each holding one half of the same child.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not long ago, I was teaching a course at the Hispanic Bible Seminary. During a break, one of my students stayed behind at her seat instead of going for coffee, and she had a look I have learned to recognize over the years. It is the look that says the question is not about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1389,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1390,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1390"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mosaicwholenesscenter.com\/ko\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why waiting rarely helps<\/h2>\n
The trap I want you to avoid<\/h2>\n
As you can notice, the gap is in the information<\/h2>\n
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Seek help!<\/h2>\n