When results fall, the dialogue between family and school can turn into a real confrontation.
For some parents, criticism of the school level is received as a deep wound. “There is sometimes a real standoff between parents and the school. When the parent identifies too much with their child, they take teachers’ criticism as a personal attack. In this pattern, he ends up considering the school as an enemy“, explains Dr Stéphane Clerget, child psychiatrist, consulted by
True Medical.
This feeling of aggression can also have its source in the parents’ own past. Seeing their child in difficulty again plunges them back into their own youthful failures, activating a protective denial so as not to relive this suffering.
Between guilt, negligence and dreams of glory
Denial does not always take the form of anger; it can also result in a minimization of the facts or a total disinvestment.
“Some parents feel so much guilt that they can’t face things. Others, through negligence, simply don’t want to ‘bother’ with school education. They prefer to invest elsewhere, for example imagining that their child will become a professional footballer. It’s a form of minimizing their own behavior.”specifies the psychiatrist.
To avoid facing reality, some do not hesitate to flee: change of establishment, move to private school or home school, thinking that the problem comes only from the setting and not from the specific needs of the child.
What academic failure sometimes seeks to hide
Sometimes, the denial is not linked to the child himself, but to what his difficulties could reveal about the family balance. Dr. Clerget emphasizes that academic failure can be a symptom of an unstable environment.
“Often parents have been poor students themselves. But it also happens that there are things to hide within the family: difficulties in the family circle, violence or alcoholism. As the child’s academic failure risks highlighting these problems, parents prefer to deny their origin.
“It’s early, it will pass” : denial in the face of disability
Denial is also found in the search for self-enhancing excuses to hide a developmental disorder or disability. We then prefer more “noble” labels to clinical reality.
“Faced with a possible handicap, some parents use alternative explanations to justify the difficulties: ‘he’s precocious’, ‘he’ll get better’… They prefer to believe in an intellectual advance rather than a real disorder.observes Dr. Clerget.
Conversely, he notes that some parents, particularly foreign ones, are not in denial but helpless: they want to help but do not master the codes of the system. For them, the help must be concrete and educational.
How to get out of the impasse and help the child?
To break denial, you must transform doubt into action. The first step is to carry out a real multidisciplinary “investigation”.
- Analyze the school report: Are the difficulties global or targeted? ;
- Assess the environment: How is it going at home? Is the child being bullied at school? ;
- Do a health check: Check vision, hearing and psychomotor assessments (for dysgraphia or dyspraxia).
“An overall assessment must be carried out to detect possible developmental delay, ADHD or a psychological problem. The speech therapist will intervene for language and dyslexia, while the psychomotor therapist will take care of dysgraphia or spatial difficulties. A psychological assessment can also test attention and IQ“, recommends the doctor.
By cross-referencing this information with the observations of teachers, we can finally say the right words. As Dr Clerget concludes: “All of this will either resolve a problem and help parents overcome denial, or explain to them that the child’s difficulties are intrinsic to him and that he simply moves forward at his own pace.