Listening to Parent Voices About SEL

MY VIEW

Increased parent activism over school curriculum and concerns about critical race theory being taught in schools have roiled school board meetings over the past year. Sometimes, parents have connected these debates to school plans to implement social and emotional learning programs as well.

Those connections may be tenuous — or completely overblown — but there are important reasons school and district leaders should take special care to connect with parents and the broader community as they work to better foster students’ social and emotional learning and health.

The most important reason schools must consider parent views on SEL is that, unlike academics, SEL is as much a family responsibility as a school responsibility. No one expects parents to be the experts when students need help factoring polynomials or making sense of the periodic table. On the other hand, learning to set goals, exhibit empathy toward others, control emotions and behavior, and other SEL-related skills are things parents teach their children from the earliest ages.

A recent nationally representative poll of parents conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and YouGov shows that parents believe they themselves were most responsible for their children developing SEL-related skills, followed by other family members, and the child herself/himself. Parents rated teachers a somewhat distant fourth.

So if families are key to developing these abilities, how best can schools engage them? Here are a few ideas.