Are parents qualified to teach their kids? Yes, here’s why.

When talking to prospective families, one of the biggest fears they have is that they’re not qualified to be their child’s teacher. 

In fact, with the changing needs of education in a digital age, parents are ideally suited to be their child’s teacher (or guide to learning) because they can provide them with Mastery Learning and personalize their learning while bringing great care and personal investment in their educational outcomes.

In order to optimize their teaching success, they can focus on ` :

1) How to communicate effectively with children at different developmental stages (which will improve their parenting experience). How to Talk So Children Learn provides a great overview of communication techniques for families and educators to drastically improve communication.

2) Choosing high-quality, mastery-based, secular learning tools (physical curriculum or apps) designed for non-educators. The Modulo curriculum finder makes it easy for families to find the ideal learning tools for their family. 

Students should still be surrounded with teachers who are not their parents, to diversify their experience and expand their horizons, but these can take many forms: aunts, uncles, museum educators, peers and mentors they meet in the community or through mentorships. 

Many parents are afraid they aren’t capable of being their child’s teacher. 

This fear falls into three basic bucket categories

1. Skills: They don’t believe they have the training to teach (or effectively guide their child’s learning). 

2. Roles: They don’t believe their child will listen to them or do what they say. In this case, they view the roles of teacher and parent as distinctly separate. They need someone else to 

3. Time: They don’t believe they have the time to teach.

Here’s how this most often manifests in my conversations with parents:

Skills -> “I can’t teach my kid because I’m not good at math myself.”

Roles -> “I can’t teach my kid, because every time I try to help them with math we get in a fight.”

Time -> “I have a full-time job and can’t provide my child with six hours of education a day.”

In the first two cases, parents are viewing the roles of parent and teacher as having distinctly different functions.In the last case, there’s an assumption that teaching at home has to look like teaching at school to get the same results. 

Let’s start with skills:

Parents have all the skills they need to teach their children and are able to use those skills more effectively than teachers and that is because of the nature of classrooms and schools themselves.

The teaching skills we need today have changed, but the modern classroom has not adapted:

 The dominant narrative is: Parents teach life skills. Teachers teach academic skills. Kids are taught - they don’t teach themselves. 

With the accessibility of information at our fingertips, the need for a teacher is much different than before. With the ability for children to easily access information, the need for teachers to provide “Direct Instruction” has greatly diminished. 

While teachers used to serve as libraries of information, now children have endless information available to them whenever they have a question or need. There are thousands of digital media apps, educational youtube channels, podcasts and even good-old fashioned books to teach them what they need to know. And what they want to know. 

Every good teacher knows this, but they are constrained by the requirements of standardized testing and serving large numbers of children at the same time, ensuring that they stay on level at school, and are able to advance to the next level. 

However, the role of the teacher has changed very little in our modern-day classrooms. Teachers still lecture. Children, despite their insatiable curiosity, which could take them so far in their learning if truly unleashed, are given very little time to explore their own interests. 

Often families assume that teachers must have some secret knowledge that they don’t possess. However, so often their training is focused on managing behavior in large classrooms and making sure the maximum number of children advance to the next level, as determined by state standards for learning. 

We need teachers today who can help guide students and sort through all the information available to them to draw intelligent conclusions, to challenge the way they think and inspire them to stretch their imaginations. They need mentors and guides.

Aren’t these skills every good parent strives to develop? And that every good parent should have?

Your primary advantage as a parent/teacher

As a parent, you have two huge, natural advantages over your child’s teacher

1. You are able to provide your child with 1-1 instruction and Mastery Learning.

2. You know your child better than anyone else and care about them more than anyone else and therefore are able to personalize their education to ensure their success.

As a parent, you have a significant advantage over any teacher in any school. And  this is that you can provide your child with personalized, 1-1 teaching :  Mastery Learning. Benjamin Bloom’s famous study showed that students who worked with a tutor had 2 sigma better progress than students who learned in a group setting. 

Try as we have, no one has been able to successfully integrate mastery learning within a group setting.  Students simply progress much faster when they are able to learn at their own pace with 1-1 instruction.

You have all the time you need to teach your child

This also resolves a  third common concern:  lack of time to teach. When kids learn in a 1-1 setting, they will learn much faster than in a group setting, so the hours of study required are much fewer.  Additionally, a greater number of hours of concentrated study does not necessarily lead to better results. It’s the concentrated, consistent hour or two of mastery learning that makes the huge difference. The Annenberg Institute found that 40 minutes a day was ideal for elementary students and one hour for middle schoolers. 

So why did you struggle so much teaching your kids during the pandemic?

During the pandemic, parents were not teaching their kids math, reading, science using their own curriculum. They were trying to help their kids keep up with work from school. Helping kids do worksheets (they may not necessarily enjoy) or write essays using a method they didn’t necessarily understand within the teacher’s framework, is very different than teaching math or ELA from a curriculum that is specifically designed for learning at home. Parents were trying to help their kids catch up with school, not teaching them learn academic skills. Had families been supporting kids with an app like Khan Academy or a math curriculum specifically designed for parents like Right Start Math, the results and the enjoyment of both parties would have been quite different. 

Helping a child with homework, trying to understand why the teacher taught it in a certain way and what they particularly expect including the way they want the child to complete the homework, completely out of context from when and where the material was taught, is naturally going to be stressful. 

When I was a substitute teacher, I found it virtually impossible to teach second grade math, because I didn’t necessarily know the specific method that the higher ups had said that kids would learn long division that year. I usually found the smartest second grader in the class and had them give the lesson. I knew long division. I knew how to problem solve, I just didn’t know that specific method. And often in school, kids are very much expected to know not just how to problem solve, but problem solve in a specific way prescribed by the school. 

This is greatly resolved by using your own physical curriculum or learning app your child enjoys and giving them the time they need to explore, not, for example, overburdening them with homework and online classes. 

Now let’s address communication

It’s shocking to me that we provide so much training to teachers and almost none to parents, on how to parents. It’s almost as if no growth happens outside the classroom and parenting is not a skill that can be cultivated and honed. 

There are some very simple techniques can use to improve communication with kids and it doesn’t take too much time to learn and start applying them. The best book on this topic is How To Talk So Children Learn. 

Communication with children can be improved and there are great resources out there to support it.  You are teaching your child many things all the time (not to mention trying to live harmoniously with them) and it’s to your advantage and to theirs to improve your communication skills and understand how children think and respond to different types of communication at different ages. 

Many families said there is no way their kid will listen to them when they teach. My own mom and I used to have screaming fights whenever she tried to edit my essays. It’s gotten a little better now as we’ve both learned how to communicate, deliver and receive constructive feedback .

Some families are also concerned that stepping in between the parent and teacher role would be hard. 

However, I think this only becomes a problem when we see the role of parent and teacher as fundamentally different. You taught your child how to walk, you taught them how to talk, you taught them not to cross the street when the light is red. Maybe you even taught them how to read. You taught them how to speak their mother language. You taught all these things by modeling them to them and guiding them to learn. You can also teach them math, science and how to appreciate great literature. You can do this by modeling learning, by supporting their self-directed learning, by  listening and using effective communication techniques that are appropriate for their developmental stage. I think that communication is an important issue to address, regardless of whether you want to teach your child to do math or teach them not to do drugs. There are specific ways to communicate and guide your child’s learning at each developmental stage that work.  Most involve reflective listening and getting in tune with your child’s needs. In Modulo, I sometimes hire artists, babysitters an actors to teach kids using a mastery-based digital learning app. I always give them this book, “How to Talk So Children Learn,” and it makes a night and day difference in learning outcomes. 

Teachers ARE amazing. 

The point of this article is not to suggest that teachers are not extraordinarily skilled, passionate and talented at what they do. 

What good teachers know how to do well that parents do not know.

• How to manage behavior large classrooms with over 30 students

• How to ensure, as much as possible, that students are prepared to do well on standardized tests.

• They can have an ability to love and nurture many children who are not their own, a natural caregiver instinct.

• They can monitor and assess children’s progress throughout the year so they don’t fall behind in a classroom before the end of the year tests.

This is why parents are better teachers

• They can learn to communicate with their child at a level that almost no one else will be able to provide

• They can care and nurture their own child better than anyone else

• They can provide 1-1 mastery learning

• They can observe their child’s learning and assess their progress continuously, making iterations as they go

I do believe that families need some accountability with their child’s education. I don’t believe the accountability provided by most schools and are standardized test system is adequate. I think there are other ways we can scale accountability, not only for academics but for social and emotional learning. However, the purpose of this blog was to demonstrate that you don’t have to be a skilled teacher to teach your child, and with the right curriculum and communication tools, you can start vastly improving their learning outcomes outside the classroom today.