Offering aid to parents

When a child invites six of nine girls in class to a birthday party, leaving out three, Jane Cohen, head of the South Area Solomon Schechter Day School in Stoughton, hears about it.

If a child is mean to another at a social event, Cohen gets a phone call.

It doesn't matter if the event isn't during school, on school property, or connected to school. Cohen said parents ask her to intervene. In part, that's because it's a small school of 216 children and a very tight-knit community.

But Cohen wants to tip the scales, making parents responsible for parenting.

"We're willing as a school to help with the outside-of-school stuff, but we can only do it as a partnership," said Cohen, who just started a 14-member parent task force to address parenting issues at the school. "I explain to parents that teaching your kids how to behave is a skill; it is not innate. They have to learn it just like math and science."

Just as children must explicitly be taught behavior, Cohen said she is "now believing we have to be explicit with the parents" about their responsibility to parent.

Home and school may be distinct realms, but educators know the powerful influence of the former on the latter. A November report by the Educational Testing Service detailed how factors at home, including parenting, affect student achievement. While the report focuses on the achievement gap for minorities and poor students, the broader message is about the potency of home.

Even as students from affluent suburban homes are well-groomed for academic success, concerns about their behavior are growing. Schools have embraced character education curriculums that explicitly teach students how to treat one another and solve disputes, but some kids don't get the same message at home. They behave at school, but act out outside the building.

Cohen has seen children behave politely to her, then chew out a parent in the parking lot. Dr. Robert Shaw, author of "The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children," said parents have become afraid of their own children, cowering in the face of opposition and appeasing them when they should be laying down the law.

"It's so insidious, they don't know anything is going on," said Shaw. "Instead, they plan everything to hide what's wrong with their kid: childproofing the living room instead of teaching their kids not to touch the stuff."

The notion that we are in the midst of a parenting crisis has traction when considering issues from college hazing to interactions that are part of every parent's life. Many know the awkwardness of having a poorly mannered child over to play, having the kid act so rudely your own child turns to catch your reaction. Who hasn't seen kids at pickup time hide upstairs, whine, or -- yes -- punch their parents?

Or, for older kids, who hasn't worried about the supervision at a party? How many parents actually call to ask? Who assumes the other parent is on the stick, but worry they're really not?

What does this have to do with schools? Everything.

"We get the spillover," said Curtis Bates, principal of the Charles D. Harrington School in Chelmsford, a prekindergarten through fourth-grade school, who spends hours managing student behavior issues. Bates said some parents are not on the same page.

"I've had instances when I call a parent and say, `Johnny has done this or that,' and I get back, `What's the big deal?' " said Bates, whose school last fall for the first time offered a 10-week parenting course, which it will repeat this winter. Bates said some parents are too busy or tired to enforce firm behavior limits -- or not tuned in to the need.

"One of the things I'm dealing with right now is spitting," said Bates, who sent home a newsletter before the holidays on the issue. "I tell them in my newsletter that spitting is assault; it is unacceptable behavior. I'm trying to get children to understand that, and parents to understand that, and that it's not a case of `Kids will be kids.' "

William Damon, author of "The Youth Charter: How Communities Can Work Together to Raise Standards for All Our Children" and director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, said the mismatch between home and school values reflects a cultural dissonance.

He said adults in most places aren't very good at working together for a common end. Plus, he said, a dearth of public leaders to serve as role models exemplifying high standards makes teaching good values tougher. As a result, he said, children's behavior is compartmentalized, changing with the context.

"Kids will rise to the level of the relationship they are in," he said. "If a kid has a teacher who expects a lot and he respects the teacher, the kid will act all right in that context. If the parent is permissive or neglectful or out to lunch, the kid doesn't bring any of those same values home."

But, he said, don't always blame the home. "Sometimes it is the school or the teacher who looks the other way," he said.

Damon said compartmentalization is basic to human development, but educators and parents in school communities can work together to create consistent messages.

Balancing school and home values also has grown trickier because schools -- particularly community or full-service schools which may offer mental health and other services -- have taken on big social responsibilities, said Holly Kreider, project manager for the Harvard Family Research Project.

"Who is responsible for which aspects of children's development?" asked Kreider. "When you move outside the academic realm and it has to do with social-emotional and behavioral issues, are those responsibilities of the family or are those shared responsibilities?"

The notion of schools teaching values is controversial. And yet, values are -- and should be -- part of a child's education. To create a value-neutral message is to risk offering no message at all.

Shaw said parents have been too hands-off and have a "fear of inculcating their values into their children."

It is hard to talk about what you expect and what you believe and to confront an irrational hormone-ridden preteen. But it must be done.

Kelly Ezickson of Sharon, parent of three boys at South Area Solomon Schechter and a clinical social worker, said parents don't feel confident about that aspect of parenting, so fall back on the logistics of the job.

"You can feel like a really good parent picking your child up at noon and having a sandwich ready," she said. "There is not as much hands-on, sitting down and listening."

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