I don’t want to nag my kid about homework…
At a summer gathering, I ran into a parent who has a son that tutors with us at All Angles. First of all, it’s always such a delight to meet and see parents in the wild. Most of the time, as tutors, we get to meet the parents right away in the very beginning, and then we’re busy working with their son or daughter week by week throughout the school year, communicating via email and phone, rarely meeting face to face again. Getting an in-person conversation with one of our All Angles parents always brings me such joy and affirms why I do what I do. So these moments of summer gatherings, graduations, and chance encounters are wonderful.
We spoke about her son’s experience and progress. But the thing she raved about? How her relationship with her sons had improved since they started tutoring! “You have to put that on your website,” she said. “Tell parents how much it helps them when their kids work with you! I stopped having to nag my kids so much about school, and it changed the game.” So here I am. Putting it on my website, and telling you all about it.
This isn’t the first time that I’m hearing about this. And again, because we spend so much time with the students, I don’t always get to hear about the experience of tutoring from the parents perspective. And yet, a very common and welcomed by-product is how relieved parents feel when they no longer have to nag their kid about homework or when their next test is or why they got a certain grade. Now, all that information comes to light during tutoring, and then is passed on to their inbox in an email. They get to know what’s going on academically in their child’s life without berating their teenager for details that are sometimes vague and even cryptic.
We cannot do everything for our kids. I’m learning this every day as I raise my two kids, and was thinking about it recently at my son’s swim lessons. He’s three, and taking lessons by himself with an instructor for the first time. And I had to reflect. I was a lifeguard for years, taught swimming lessons to 6 month olds to 12 year olds, and swam on the swim team. And yet, I know without a shadow of a doubt, that I am not the right person to teach my son how to swim. Sometimes, we just have to outsource certain roles in our kid’s lives (tutor, swim instructor, piano teacher etc.) so that we can just be “Mom” or “Dad.”
These mentorships and roles are assuredly practical, but they are also formative in our children’s social and emotional development as they learn to build and maintain relationships, ask for help, and feel comfortable making mistakes and learning from them. We’ve heard that it takes a village, and it does. But sometimes we have to think about what that means. The investment in a tutor will certainly support your child academically. But the investment in the right tutor can support them in a way that reaches beyond the scope of academic education. For me, it isn’t just about the grades. It’s about building villages of support for our kids so that they are prepared to become independent, young adults. That’s why we do what we do.