I have had a busy day today and I am feeling a bit tired.  However, there was something that made it feel much more worthwhile.  I did an assessment with a child today at one of the schools I support and afterwards I met the child’s mother.  It was actually really good because all she wanted was to understand what she could do to help her child.  She also asked very intelligent questions which does tend to make it more interesting – she was good at seeing to the heart of the issues, but the main thing was how interested and keen she was to help.

You may find it surprising that this doesn’t happen to me more often.  It does happen quite often but it’s really surprising how many parents don’t seem all that interested.  It would be really useful to understand why that is; maybe they are nervous of strange professional people, or maybe there’s something wrong with how we invite parents to come to talk about things or something.  I really like it when parents bother me because then I can do my job a lot better, and otherwise I have to try to bother them just a bit, which is not always quite so good.

I suppose another problem might be that they have to work so then they can’t come and talk to me at school.  I don’t think that’s true for all parents though.  The thing is it makes a lot of difference to their child if they do come as then they know what they can do at home.  I suppose some people get that from my reports but I suspect that’s not true for all that many.