There's No Way Around Parent Responsibility

To what extent are schools and parents each responsible for kids and their welfare and all the things that kids need?

I think ultimately there's no way around the fact that parents are responsible for their kids and there are lots of things that we try to do as educators.

We try to keep an eye on, we try to provide support, but ultimately the scope of our mission is fairly narrow being Right.

We're here to teach.

And of course, we have this whole child emphasis.

ASCD had a big initiative around whole child focus a couple of years ago.

And I think that's still ongoing.

And I think, you know, it sounds good.

But the reality is that we just have a very limited capacity to meet the needs of the whole child.

And one of the big reasons why.

for this is that kids are not with us all the time, right?

It's like, you know, little kids think their teacher lives at the school and they're really surprised to see you at the grocery store.

Like we fall into that same thinking trap and thinking that kids only exist when they're at school.

And therefore we think that we can meet all of their needs.

And like, certainly there are things we can do during the school day.

And as I said, in my other two videos on this, but people still seem to think I'm not saying this, we should feed kids at school, right?

That is a good opportunity to make sure that everybody gets fed.

And I don't think that's good enough.

I don't think that's the only thing we should do.

I think there are probably better approaches out there, but it really seems to me that a lot of people don't consider the fact that kids are in the charge of their parents like 88% of the time.

If you do the math on how much of the entire year kids are at home versus at school, they're only at school about 12% of the time.

And that is a lot less than a lot of people think.

You know, of course you've got nights, but you also have evenings and weekends, you have just the after school hours, but also the non-school days, Saturdays and Sundays, summers, school breaks.

It's only about 12% of the time that kids are actually in school.

So all of these things that we do for kids, I think are great, but they're never going to take the place of or fully make up for any lack of care that kids are getting at home because kids are at home like 88% of the time.

It is a large proportion of their lives.

And to whatever extent what we're doing in schools is masking problems at home, covering up information that would otherwise be coming to us, I think we've got to really think about that.

Like, if a kid is routinely coming to school without food, yes, we can give them food and we should, we should keep doing that.

But what do you think is happening to that kid at home?

If you're supposed to bring a lunch from home, and that's the case in a lot of schools in, you know, a lot of countries around the world, you're supposed to bring a lunch from home.

If we don't have that expectation of parents that they pack a lunch, and we haven't for a long time because we've provided school lunch, again, a good thing.

But if we don't have that source of information, we don't really know which kids are not getting fed at home.

So I think that's really something worth thinking about.

And a lot of people have said in the comments, the hot lunch they get at school might be the only hot meal they get.

Again, think about that.

What is that saying?

Are you saying you're okay with a kid only getting two meals out of three, only 180 days out of 365?

That is not good enough.

We should keep giving the meals out that we can, but there's no shortcut around parental responsibility.

And the reality is, A lot of kids are in a sad situation or in a difficult situation when it comes to parental responsibility.

So I think we need to not hide our eyes from sources of evidence that a family needs more support.

I think we need to have more robust support for families, more resources for families, and You know, I think we can debate as a society the best way to do that and the best way to make sure that those supports actually benefit the kids and not some other adult need, because certainly that's a concern.

And one of the things we like about providing services at school is we can kind of make sure that the kid actually gets the thing that we want them to get.

But again, I think we've got to do what we can for kids while recognizing that there is no way around parental responsibility because parents are just in charge of their kids most of the time.

Let me know what you think.