Following on from a discussion on another thread. Can you imagine greeting the parent of a disruptive child and saying 'Oi, shithead, you smell like cheese.' Alternatively, in one of those conversations where a parent has complained because you've embarrassed little Johnny when they turned up to your lesson late with no book, no pen and no apparent interest in actually being there 'Well, the reason your darling is failing hard is because they literally don't give a crap and you've sent them that message, so if you want them to get anything out of school, and not be like you on universal credit living off chicken nuggets, maybe you should stop complaining about us and take a long hard look at your own parenting technique, that's if you can get off your back long enough to actually focus on anything that's not your latest deadbeat boyfriend.'
You see, this is what teachers actually know. We can wrap it up any way people want. We can believe (and many of us do) that all behaviour is an attempt to communicate. And as nice as it might be to offer the 80 billion excuses available at any given time, what the kids are communicating to us is that their parents are ridiculously ill-equipped to be actual parents. Oddly, I don't blame them for this. Huge spikes in poverty. Serious addiction issues. Overcrowded housing. Limited access to MH provision. People are drowning. But you know what? We (teachers) are not the enemy.
Why is it that parents and carers find it so hard to work with us? I'm from a really terrible background, don't own my own house, am even partial to a cut-price Spoons afternoon deal, so what gives? How did we get here? Why are we at each others throats? What would make a genuine difference?