No one warns you about parenting guilt. Instead, it emerges in the first days of parenthood as an itch that can’t be relieved, and then it slowly creeps into your psyche and makes itself a permanent home.

Soon, everything to do with your child makes you feel guilty. Then you go on social media and you realise that the list of reasons to feel guilty is much longer than you first thought. You pile guilt on guilt.

And then your child goes to school. Somehow, this takes the guilt to the next level. The first time your child turns up in school uniform on a non-uniform day? The first time you miss the memo on the latest trendy thing every other child has? The first time you are late to pick them up? I could go on. I have done them all.

But what I struggle with most are the meetings and the homework projects and the PTA and the fundraisers and the volunteering for school trips and all that we lump into “parental engagement”. I know how important it is; I read about it all the time. But I have little time to do or attend any of those things.

That’s not an excuse but a reality. It’s a reality, actually, for most parents. And it got me thinking about the term “parental engagement”. At its core, it’s about supporting and engaging with the education of a child. It is about caring what happens to that child at school and helping them to achieve. There are thousands of ways to do and show that, but they are not easily measurable and not always easily understood.

The latter is a problem because we can sometimes misinterpret protection as aggression, insecurity as nonchalance, defensiveness as obstruction. We can label a parent as not being engaged but what we mean is “not engaged in a way we would like”. Those are two very different things that need different responses. Not many parents will fall into the not-engaged category, but a lot of us will fall into the category of not being engaged in the way some schools might like.

The measurement issue is important, too. It’s difficult for an outsider to see into a home and know how much help is going on with homework, how far parents ask about a child’s day, how much support is offered to the school. So, engagement is measured by proxies: meetings attended, speed of communication, presence at parents’ evenings and so on. These are all poor proxies. There are numerous reasons a parent may not hit those measurement points (work, anxiety, illness, circumstance) - a lack of engagement is just one and arguably the least likely.

This week’s “How I” feature is an interesting example. The parents of excluded children are often inaccurately thought of as being the most disengaged. Yet at Brenda McHugh’s pupil referral unit, parents engage in an eight-week training programme to reintegrate their children into school life. How does the school manage it? Interestingly, it attempts to remove the guilt. “No one wants to be a parent of an excluded child,” McHugh says. “This is about taking the stigma away and giving them the tools to better communicate with their child and the school.”

McHugh’s initiative shows that some schools are doing great work in this area. It shows that, with an emotionally intelligent view of what engagement is, of how parents feel and of how to harness it, everything is possible.

So, this is a plea for us to undo the shackles on what parental engagement is perceived to be. Our current perception of it is often too narrow, too loaded with assumption. Parenting is not an exact science - it’s an unseen gut feeling. The reason it makes us feel so guilty is because we never know if we are right. Parental engagement is the same: most of us do what we can; it just might not look how all schools expect it to. Sometimes, what parents need most is an external voice to say that, actually, we are doing a decent job.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 30 July 2021 issue under the headline “For true parental engagement, pile on the empathy, not the guilt”