Against my wishes, I am often the go-to guy for younger teachers with questions. One of the most common questions they ask me is how often they should contact parents. Parental contact is one of those topics where you don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush because the answer really does depend on the situation. Every parent is different. Every student is different. Every teacher is different. Every situation is different.

There are parents who will want to hear about every little thing. There are some that will stop answering your calls if they hear from you too much.  

Some students are more difficult than others and will require more parent contact. That isn’t to say your honor roll students with no behavior problems shouldn’t also receive parent contact but with them you have more flexibility.

Not every teacher will contact parents at the same rate. As mentioned before, some parents want a call about everything, every day and some teachers will be more than happy to indulge them. Me personally, I’m not calling home every day just because. I don’t have the capacity to do so even if I wanted to.

Situations vary from teacher to teacher. My wife taught 25 second graders all day for every subject. At that same time, I was teaching 130 eighth graders for 50 minutes a day in one subject. Obviously, there was no way I was going to match the amount of contact she had with any single student’s parents. And given the difference in interaction times, I didn’t really need to. Additionally, middle and high school parents typically don’t need or want to hear from their child’s teachers as much as elementary parents do.

Given these vast differences between parents, students, teachers, how does one assess how often they should be making contact? Here are a few guiding principles that can keep you in mind when considering your contact with parents.

A parent should not find out a student is failing from a report card.

The function of a report card is to give parents an overall benchmark of their child’s academic performance. It does not take the place of actual contact. Moreover, contact should be made well in advance of the final grades that appear on the report card. Finding out your child is failing via a report card is the equivalent of finding out your car is out of gas when it stops. It is too late to stop for fuel or change course. That’s the reason your car comes with a fuel gauge. You should be helping parents gauge their child’s progress all year long.

A parent should not only hear from you when their child is failing or misbehaving.

Even the most difficult students will occasionally do things that are praiseworthy, and you should take that opportunity to tell the parents that they did well. Sometimes parents become hostile to school contact. Nine times out of ten, this is a parent who is only being called about negative behavior. And just for the record, your students who earn good grades and have good behavior all the time should still receive calls home.   

A parent should not only receive academic or behavior updates.

Students are whole people with lives outside of school. If you notice a kid seems depressed, you should probably contact their parents. If a student hasn’t been to school in a week, you should try and find out what is going on. If a student displays interest or talent in an extracurricular activity, you may want to pass that information on too.

Parent contact doesn’t have to be a call.

A lot of the conversations around parent contact start with the premise that said contact has to be a long, drawn-out phone call. It does not. Some parents text and email, and actually many parents prefer it. Think about what the most practical way to deliver the information is and do that.

Parent contact can seem daunting, but to be honest, it is really simple. If you are keeping parents sufficiently updated on academic and behavioral progress, then you are probably doing enough. Just make sure you are balancing the good with the bad, and that you are not leaving out your less-challenging students who sometimes fall under the radar.