Suzanne Harrington: A parent's survival guide for back to school
Back to school! Here’s a short survival guide from kindergarten to the day they leave/are expelled.
Not for them, for you.
Two words: benign neglect. Start by uninstalling the tracking device plaited into your child’s hair, stop hovering over them like an anxious helicopter, and if you must cry, let it be from relief.
You’re about to get your life back. A bit.
Leave them alone, they’re knackered.
They do crowd control all day while trying to engage rowdy kids with stuff like algae and algebra and the modh coinniollach (no, me neither) then go home and spend the evening prepping and form filling and correcting, despite our kids assuming they sleep upright in the stationery cupboard.
Teachers in Ireland spend 915 hours a year in the classroom, compared with the international average of 768.
They probably self-medicate a lot. They are not personally responsible for Siofra not getting an A in biology.
Siofra has been on Snapchat all term.
Unfortunately, if your child is cursed with popularity, you will have to suck up the horror that is the aspirational playdate.
We’ve all seen Motherland - it’s much worse than that.
Pecking orders, hierarchies, vicious feuding, wrangling over possessions – and that’s just the adults.
Your kid will inevitably form a bond with the nightmare kid whose allergies include tap water and all carbohydrates, and whose parent uses playdates as a showcase for performative lifestyling.
You’ll have had the pre-playdate WhatsApp asking what you’ll be feeding them, because little Briony will only eat seasonal organic fruit cut into small cubes not touching each other on the plate.
You’ll have to bribe little Briony with more Kitkats to keep quiet about the earlier Kitkats.
It’s fine. We’ve all done it. Shush, Briony. Here’s a Twix as well.
It would be quicker, easier and more humane to skip this bit entirely and release teens into the wild with a smartphone and a Swiss Army knife, rather than shoving them through years of exam pressure ritual, pretending that their entire future depends on a B in chemistry.
However, as society deems this unacceptable, instead we nag about homework and revision, while all the time marvelling at how the entire system is geared towards Lisa Simpson rather than Bart.
If you have a Bart, be prepared for daily calls from the school about the wrong homework, the wrong socks, the wrong attitude, the wrong friends, the telling of teachers in no uncertain terms what they might like to do with themselves.
If you have a Lisa, you can look forward to acute exam anxiety, cliquey friendships, possible eating disorders, and alcohol poisoning on results night.
But here’s the good news – it ends!
Just twelve more years to go, newbies, before you never again have to do parents evening, and register the managed unease on the class teacher’s face when they realise you’re the parent of the kid who set the school toilets on fire.
Those twelve years will fly by. Yay!
