ABSTRACT
Regardless of the quality of a family’s relationships, it behooves teachers, as it does child psychologists, to forge connections and invest in relationships with parents. The parent-teacher relationship can provide all adult parties with crucial information and collaboration when they’re most necessary. Parents naturally have a host of expectations, anxieties, and fears when it comes to their child’s education. Some adults are impressed for the simple reason that many of them consider teenagers at best a mystery and at worst a cultural affliction. Earning parents’ trust comes down to managing the relationship with care and skill from the start. The hardest conversations to have with a parent include those where their child is making inadequate academic progress, displaying aggressive behavior, seeming depressed, or even revealing self-injurious behavior.
