What To Do When A 15-Year-Old Says Their Parents Don’t Care About Their Education: A Teacher’s Perspective
I’m slouched behind my guidance office desk on a Tuesday after school, the building’s heating still on the fritz so I’m wearing two sweaters, when Javi knocks and pushes in. He’s 15, in 10th grade, wears a faded Ford hoodie with a coffee stain across the cuff, and he’s been on my check-in list since his grades dropped from mostly Bs to three failing marks first quarter. I ask him what’s going on, why he’s turning in so little work, and he picks at a loose thread on his hoodie and says, plain as anything, “My parents don’t care about my education anyway. What’s the point of trying?”
I’ve heard that line more times than I can count in my 8 years working at this public high school. Most people outside of schools hear it and jump to one of two conclusions: the parents are lazy and don’t care about their kid, or the kid is just making excuses for bad grades. Neither is true, most of the time. Javi’s case is pretty typical. He told me his parents both work two jobs: his dad does construction during the week and cleans offices on weekends, his mom works at a grocery store checkout and does childcare for a neighbor’s kid three nights a week. They leave the house before he wakes up most mornings, and they’re still not home when he goes to bed half the time. When he does catch them to show a progress report or ask for help with homework, his dad just glances at it over his phone while he answers work texts and says, “Don’t get held back, that’s all I need to know.” His mom dropped out of school when she was 16 to have Javi’s older sister, so she says she doesn’t understand any of the algebra or biology he’s working on anyway, so there’s no point in her trying. After a while, Javi just stopped asking. He stopped bringing work home to show them, stopped turning it in at school, because if the people that are supposed to care don’t, why should he?
The first thing I did wasn’t immediately call his parents to chew them out. That’s the most common mistake people make, I’ve learned. When you open with “Your kid says you don’t care about their education,” you put overwhelmed parents on the defensive immediately. Most of these parents are already convinced they’re failing their kid, so they shut down instead of engaging. I also didn’t badmouth his parents to Javi. A lot of new counselors do that, trying to bond with the kid by agreeing how terrible their parents are. But that just leaves the kid feeling guilty and more alone, because even when their parents are dropping the ball, they still love them. I just said, “That sounds really heavy. You have to handle all this by yourself, huh?” and he nodded, that was enough to get him opening up about what he actually wanted, not just the vague “they don’t care” line.
I asked him to tell me one small thing his parents could do that would make him feel like they cared. Not “help me with homework every night” or “come to every parent teacher conference,” just one small thing. He thought for a minute and landed on two: first, that they’d keep a little basket by the front door for school forms, so he doesn’t have to hunt them down for three days to get a signature, and second, that they’d ask him how his auto tech class is going once a week. He loves that class, he’s been fixing old lawnmowers with his uncle since he was 12, and he wants to do it for a living. That was it. No big asks, just two tiny, specific things.
When I called his dad a couple days later, I didn’t open with the bad grades. I opened with the auto tech class. I told him Javi had fixed a broken alternator the week before that none of the other 10th graders could figure out, that his teacher said he’s one of the most talented kids they’ve had in the program in years. His dad was quiet for a minute, then said he didn’t even know Javi was working on alternators at school. He said he knew Javi liked messing with cars, but he never thought to ask, because he thought school was the school’s job, and he didn’t know anything about what they do there anyway. I told him what Javi had asked for: the basket by the door for forms, and a quick question about auto tech once a week. I didn’t ask him to quit his weekend job or learn algebra or come to PTA. He said that sounded doable. I also told him about the free after-school tutoring we have at the school, that it doesn’t cost anything and can fit around his schedule, so Javi could get help with homework without them having to rearrange anything. That took a lot of pressure off him right away.
Three months later, Javi’s dad showed up to the auto tech open house last Saturday. He swapped shifts with a guy at work so he could come. I saw Javi show him the alternator he fixed, and his dad asked him a dozen questions about how he did it. Javi’s math grade is up to a C+ now, he hasn’t skipped a day of school since that Tuesday in my office. He’s talking about applying to the community college’s automotive technology program after he graduates.
It’s not perfect. Last week Javi came in and complained his dad still forgot to sign his driver’s ed permit form twice. Some nights his parents are still too tired to ask about anything when they get home. He still struggles with the feeling that he’s mostly on his own, some days. But that’s the thing I’ve learned from all these kids: when a kid says their parents don’t care about their education, you don’t need to overhaul the whole family to fix it. Most of the time, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they don’t know what small things count. Parents think they need to be homework coaches and PTA presidents to show they care, but most kids just want to know that the thing they care about matters to their parents, too.
For any teacher or caregiver reading this, the next time you hear that line, don’t jump to blame anyone. Just ask the kid what one small thing they want, then ask the parents for that one small thing. That’s more than enough to start turning things around. We’re still working with Javi, and there are still hard days, but it’s progress, the kind that sticks.
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