Despite the continuing concerns about wellbeing and workload, teaching is still viewed by many as a family-friendly career choice. Websites recommend it as a “child friendly” option that will “fit around the nursery run”[1] and the oft-critiqued holidays obviously provide the option of being with your own children rather than the expense of holiday clubs, the imposition of childcare onto friends or family or the challenges of finding extended babysitting. And yet, social media is full of people battling with the guilt of being a teacher and a parent: “How do other mums manage this feeling?” asks one, whilst calls for practical tips are frequent. Christmas brings worries about attending nativities; summer brings missed sports days. Throughout it all, there’s a terrible sense of guilt at failing to be both excellent teacher and excellent parent and the pervading fear: “my child is missing out”.
As the child of two lifelong teachers myself, I have sometimes responded to these worries, trying to offer reassurance: I gained far more than I missed. After perhaps the fifth time of doing so, I wondered: am I just lucky to have had a positive experience? Do other adults from teaching families feel they did indeed miss out?
I ran two polls on Twitter: one for parent teachers and one for the children of teachers, asking this very question. I gave three options : do the children of teachers benefit, miss out or ‘other’[2]. Although I tried not offer my own opinion until this blog, the results were not far from what I had expected:
- Of the parents, just over 51%[3] of the responses to the question felt their children missed out.
- Of the children, 80% felt they benefitted. Only 10% said they missed out.
Perhaps because of the emotion involved in this issue, I received message after message but, notably, only one negative was from someone who had grown up with a teacher for a parent: she felt that had been detrimental “in some ways”, citing a sense of a mother who didn’t seem very present. The other messages were from adults who felt they had benefitted mostly or wholly from having parents who were teachers and, overwhelmingly, from mothers who worried that their teaching career was damaging to their children.
This contrast is the most interesting thing I take from these polls and the associated conversations. I expected a difference, but not so significant a disparity. Parents are intensely worried that their children will miss out, but the majority of the children are, even with retrospect, happy. Perhaps it is exactly because teacher parents are so worried that they make great parents or perhaps it is that we see the effects of troubled parenting and it reinforces this sensitivity and determination to be aware of the pitfalls.
Of course, I’m conscious of factors influencing our views of childhood: parents might claim to know better what their children miss: we are – after all- only aware of our own experiences. I’m also aware that the lives of teachers twenty years ago are different to those in the current age of internet and the associated pressures. However, although I don’t know what it is like to grow up with parents outside education, I am conscious of the experiences of friends and family who had parents in other professions. I certainly wouldn’t claim either is ‘better’ but, ironically, given the concerns of my colleagues, there is a sense of far less extended family time than I enjoyed and certainly less direct support with schooling.
And so, I’d like to leave you with some of the positives: the evidence in support of the teacher parent, from the words of those who lived the experience:
- We had the summer holidays together which is time you cannot buy. Sometimes we went away and sometimes it was just a chance to do nothing together. That just doesn’t happen with my husband’s job and our kids.
- Was nice to have everyone in the household have the same thing in common by all being at school!
- They could help me with homework without doing it for me. It annoyed me at the time, but it meant school didn’t think I was flying high when I actually needed some help.
- My mum understood what teenage was life far better than some of my friends’ parents. That made it harder to get away with some stuff but, as a parent myself now, thank GOD she knew!
- I had mates over a lot because my parents were used to loads of kids around and we would hang out at ours loads in the summer.
- My dad knew when to intervene and when to stay out of school stuff. He never dismissed or minimised my stress at exams because they knew what it was like -that was everything from SATS to when I did A Levels.
- I didn’t have to go to camp or my grandparents’ in the holidays when I was little and I was able to learn to be bored, safely.
- I know my mum felt dreadful missing nativities and things (although she did have one head who let her go) and my grandad was the one who came to sports day when we were little. Would I swap that for the holidays we spent with her? Absolutely not. Would she? Harder to say.
Thank you to all those who responded to the polls and to those who agreed to be quoted in this blog. In some cases, I have changed details to ensure anonymity.
[1] https://www.motherandbaby.co.uk/money-and-work/working-mums/need-a-new-job-child-friendly-career-ideas-to-fit-around-the-nursery-run
[2] I included a fourth option to avoid skewing results: “Just looking”
[3] Calculated as a percentage of responses to the three options: “Just looking” responses were discounted.
Pocket Pedagogy @Ms_McK_says 