Wrong Timing: Do Not Disturb. Talking to Your Children About Their Day at School

Hela Marjan

Instagram – @helamarjan

About Hela

I am a British Afghan, living in the Netherlands, I am married and have two children, I have a Masters in Human Resource Management and I work as a finance and practice manager in my husband’s GP practice. I have a deep passion for learning about the psychology and behaviour of humans and its impact on raising children. The zeal to grow and enrich myself does not die and this helps me to become a better mother.

Why is it that when we ask our children about how their day went at school we get immediately interrupted by getting super short responses, “It was good”, or “I forgot, or “I’m tired”. Naturally, we are curious parents and we get irritated by hearing repetitively the same short responses day after day. We feel we need to know more, the bits and pieces, slightly more detailed answers, hearing a long sentence is a true blessing but that does not happen so easily. And this communication breakdown is frustrating for parents and children.

But for us things changed when one night we found out that our son had a science presentation the next day. Understandably the preparation was incomplete and the presentation lacked finesse and clarity. After performing badly we knew things had to change especially the dynamic of our communication. Our son had to use a screen-free week to think about what had happened and reflect, whilst we had a week to think about what we could do better. I like the saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” If our old method of wishing to know everything immediately after school had worked we would not be thinking of changing it, but clearly, our children were holding back information about deadlines and work, which meant we had to fix it. There was something to be done on both ends, our son had to think and reflect and we too had had to reassess our approach.

Our strategy since then is to give our kids the space and time to relax after school instead of bombarding them with questions by the school gate, allow them to take their time to get home, put their feet up and unwind. And after a while of spending some time on their screens, we ask about school. We have noticed that this works better because Mondays after school they already know what the coming week will look like. If there is any school work to be completed at home, they tell us in good time. This is more willingly and thoroughly, which is so gratifying to see. Our daughter had spelling homework and she told us herself rather than trying to drill it out of her immediately after school. It is so pleasing to see them grow this way.

Two things played a part here. Firstly, by performing poorly altered them to rethink about their attitude. If our son had been more elaborate about school information we could have helped him better and that he understood. Secondly, we too had to change our attitude. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking about school, but futile when the moment is wrong. They have just been out of school and they do not want to be engaged in lengthy conversations about the miniature details and that is understandable.

We listened to our children, so when they say “we are tired”, it means they are tired.

We put ourselves in their shoes and we were able to see it from their perspective, and this made us more aware as parents. Our curious nature compels us to yearn for more information to plan better and allow the week to go smoothly, without getting late evening project surprises. But our experience has taught us that when you overwhelm children with too much too quickly after school, they choose the easy way out by being very brief, annoyed and hence forgetting to share.

Curiosity has helped humans survive and come so far and it is also helping us to survive in our role as parents and that is fantastic, it should not change. The sheer manner of dealing with curiosity had to change so it fits well with the needs of our family.

Wrong Timing: Do Not Disturb. Talking to Your Children About Their Day at School