Reply With QuoteDianne - I don't think that having teenagers sounds very easy or straight forward. It is a tough situation to be in because I agree with you that it is difficult for you to give consequences to him for things that happen in the classroom. While I was a behaviour management teacher, the advice we gave to parents was that it was the school's responsibility to give consequences for behaviour until the behaviour became an inconvenience to the parents and then the parents needed to reinforce the consequence. I think it was about respect for the child and not double discipline for issues that had already been dealt with but I also worked with primary aged kids and things were a lot more straightforward.
I think the teachers are calling you because they have no idea how to manage the behaviour themselves to be honest. High schools generally don't send kids to the principal like they did in primary schools and the teacher is a lot more responsible for the behaviour management in their own classrooms - the teachers may be feeling very unsupported and have no idea what else to do either.
Some teenagers respond to strong consequences and others really don't because it is actually not about how strict parents are, but more about the teenager themselves. Some teenagers realise very early on that they don't have to let consequences affect them and if they choose not to care about what is going on around them, then they are very difficult manage. I was a very compliant child and teenager and did what my parents told me to. Their discipline and management worked on me because of the sort of person I was. My younger brother would shrug his shoulders and just take off with friends and not come back for a couple of days. He chose to not be controlled by them and so he wasn't.
For this reason, I think we need a different approach to teenagers. I don't have teenagers and have never tested out my own theories so ignore me if you wish, but I don't think negative consequences work on teenagers. Teenagers are in that stage of life where they are transitioning from dependence on their parents and the other adults around them to independence as their own adult individual. They are experimenting with their freedom and chuck into that mix that their body is producing hormones to make changes but there are no set levels (think the first few days after having a baby when your body doesn't know how much milk to make so it just goes ballistic until it figures out the right levels) so they have a lot of extra stuff going on.
I would recommend reading a book called 'Parent Effectiveness Training'. I have just read it. It has some pretty challenging concepts in there (for me anyway) especially in the first few chapters, but keep with it because it really makes a lot of sense by the end. It is about how to change the way that we talk to our kids and teenagers. I am a big fan of the line of thinking that if there is a continuuing behaviour problem going on, often it is our own attitude that has to change rather than the child/teenager. This book just gives some new strategies for talking to kids/teenagers about what is going on in their life and talks a lot about active listening.
Anway, very side tracked from the title of the thread. I agree that teachers should not touch students if they are uncomfortable with it - actually, I think all physcial contact should be avoided when a teacher is correcting a student's behaviour. Touching in those circumstances is not only inappropriate but puts the teacher in a lot of risk. I saw a teacher touch the chair of a child that she was telling off one day and that child threw themselves on the floor and despite having witnesses to the incident, the teacher underwent full investigation from the Education Department. She was eventually cleared, but she left herself wide open. Also touching a child in those incidences, can lead to a violent outburst in return because touching kids crosses a boundary and if the teacher is the first to break that boundary, the child can often slap the unwanted touch away. Sometimes teachers do need to take responsibility for how they inflame the situation as well. I am not saying the student is innocent, but our actions can provoke behaviours in others and I have done formal observations of teachers who get into power struggles with kids and very quickly start playing a victim role because they have it in for the kid from the beginning. Teachers are just human too and just like people in society behave like that, there are teachers that also behave like that. Their classrooms become their power realms and some kids don't respond well to that kind of authoritativeness. Sorry, I am getting side tracked again.
I think you are well within your rights to ask the teachers not to touch your DS. To be honest, she sounds like she is touching him because she feels out of control of the situation. Yelling in the face of a student is the sign of person who is out of control and teenagers are exceptionally good at picking up on that.
There are some things in life you can change and there are other things you can't. You can't change the teachers attitude, you can't even necessarily change your DS's attitude, you can only change yourself and how you approach the situation. The best thing for you to do is probably try and get a few different strategies if you feel that it is not working at the moment. You are in a tough situation too because you are also trying to maintain some form of relationship with your teenage son and having to be the bad guy and deal with school's left overs at the end of every day is not always the best relationship building steps.
Anyway, I am not really sure what point I am trying to make. I don't have teenagers yet, I have worked minimally with teenagers but I do understand the issues are complex and delicate and what works for one family, doesn't always work for another. I guess 'power over' forms of behaviour management (while not at all ideal) work on smaller children, but on teenagers, you need to appeal to their growing independence and need for recognition of that.
I will stop waffling now since I have written this whole post and don't really think I have a point ... sorry.
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