Meet the Parents: Navigating the Challenges of High-Maintenance Families

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Originally published in TEACH Magazine, January/February 2020 Issue

By Alex Newman

Most parents are rational, reasonable, and respectful, but it’s those high maintenance ones that every teacher dreads. And the situation seems to be worsening each year.

Whether they are too stretched time-wise to have the necessary patience to deal with an under-achieving child, or just plain angry—irate parents add strain to a teacher’s already overloaded emotional and mental resources.

It doesn’t seem fair—you took up teaching as a vocation, intent on guiding students through the wonderful world of knowledge, looking forward to those moments when the lightbulb would go off and concept would become reality.

You’re doing your best, but for some parents that’s not good enough. This hits some teachers, especially the very creative ones, more than others, says Jen McColl, a Toronto elementary school teacher. She’s friends with a “wonderful teacher who did lots of cool stuff with kids and is now on stress leave. A lot of what he needed a break from was [the] onslaught of parental questioning about what he was doing, and that generates conflict.”

For McColl, conflict comes most when parents question everything you do, whether it’s “curriculum, class management, interactions with the students, or which after-school activity I should be running.”

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Alex Newman is a Toronto freelance writer and editor. Visit her website, alexnewmanwriter.com.

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Alex Newman
Alex Newman
Alex Newman is a Toronto freelance writer and editor. Visit her website, alexnewmanwriter.com.

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