First Education News

2 years of pandemic parenting has left many parents exhausted from the constant ups and downs of anxiety. With the start of the new school year, parents are also assisting their children in readjusting to in-person instruction and attempting to allay their concerns with the Delta version. Additionally, they are attempting to continue “regular” activities like taking children to sporting events.

Parental stress is increasing among this mountain of duty. However, some parents may also feel as though their empathy reserves are depleting. Burnt out parents may feel tapped out and unable to handle one more stressor. Researchers believe that this emotion may be a symptom of compassion fatigue, a medical ailment that has impacted front-line responders to the COVID-19 outbreak. Parents and frontline workers both experience compassion fatigue, but there are some similarities in the symptoms.

Amidst all the new normal that each one of us is settling into compassion fatigue in parents is also contributed by financial struggles that the COVID-19 has left. Regaining financial health (as it was before the pandemic) is a must on every family head’s mind to ensure actually getting back to normal. However, not many are able to do it and then the struggle to meet all expenses including the child’s educational fees and the other expenses related to education.

Once a physical school starts, every demand related to physical school needs to be fulfilled which actually had taken a back seat during the pandemic. The pandemic gifted amazing price rise and inflation but not an increase in financial growth to all to meet the inflation. This is a major cause of compassion fatigue in parents.

To top the anxiety matrix is that parents could clearly see every step that child took forward in his/her education while the classes were online. Not to forget the parents were absolutely in close proximity of the child taking classes and ensuring all kind of required and not required help to the children. Due to the pandemic and close proximityat home, parents actually forgot that at some point in time the child will go back to the normal school and needs to work independently even during the lockdown to better prepare for the future. However, excess care and love was showered, may be not at all homes, but at majority homes, ensuring absolute spoon feeding and utmost care.

This has left children baffled in front of a teacher who has to take care of an average 30-40 children in one class and personal attention is not possible at all time.

Parents had easy access to teachers via WhatsApp, LMS systems, emails etc… and yes teachers were really proactive in answering the queries since it was all done to ensure that teaching-learning gap is kept at the minimum. However, once we are back to the normal physical school, it is not the old system of communication between parent and school that we want to go back to but the same personalised dialogue. However, we need to keep in mind that parents are also back to their offices with not enough time to be able to have a look at the child’s progress and similarly teachers are in classrooms and not at home who can promptly reply to a WhatsApp, LMS systems, emails etc….

Here is where the Parent- School Partnership of the next level is required. To ensure Compassion Fatigue to not hit parents or teachers and most important that both can cater to the needs and growth of the children.

I am sure there are parents who belong to education field and understand the challenges of both a parent and an educator. Requesting parent educators to leave their comments on what kind of Parent-School Partnership that you as a parent look forward to.