How can you persuade your child to talk to you about school?!

Starting school isn’t easy and we don’t just mean for the four-year olds… Through her Times education blog ‘School Gate’, Sarah Ebner found that she was being asked the same questions time and again. Now she has distilled all those questions, fears and anxieties into one book, giving parents the low-down on what they really need to know. In the following extract, Sarah offers tips on how to find out what your daughter is getting up to all day…

Isn’t it strange that your chatty, friendly child goes so monosyllabic when asked about school? And just when you were feeling so curious about what he had been up to. This comment from Suzanne may well ring a bell with you.

“When I ask Charlotte what she’s done at school, she nearly always says “nothing” or that she “can’t remember,” she says. “I found this very frustrating until I realised that all her friends were saying the same!”

Children do not always want to share everything with their parents, and now they are big enough to go to school, many want to keep that part of their lives secret. After all, school is their domain.

This can be hard for parents, especially when they are already worried about losing “control” over what their child is up to. I’d generally recommend that you go along with it (you don’t have much choice!) but there are a few ways to get at least some of that much coveted information about what’s going on during your child’s school day.

Here are five tips:

• Don’t ask too many questions:
  - if anything is guaranteed to make a child clam up, it’s bombarding her with a question the moment she walks out of the classroom. Give her a bit of space and she may decide to talk to you later on (often when she is in the bath or getting ready for bed).
• Give her something to eat:
  - grumpy children are rarely forthcoming. Once she has a bit of food inside her, she may be more open to questions.
• Ask other children:
  - some children will say a lot more to their friends’ parents than to their own.
• Ask in a different way:
  - perhaps ask if there was something which made her laugh at school that day, or what the “best thing” was.
• Talk about your day:
  - it may encourage her to open up about her.

Parenting expert and coach Joanne Mallon also has this advice:
“You could ask ‘so was anybody naughty in school today?’ Yes this is a bit mean, but children can be very enthusiastic when it comes to ratting on other people’s misdemeanours. And then you can steer the conversation round to what else their day consisted of.”

Many schools have weekly newsletters. If yours is one of these, then you can use it as a starting point for discussion (“I see you have been making collages this week at school. Did you use leaves? What colours were they?”)

“My daughter usually says “nothing” or “I don’t know” if I ask her about school, as if school is over and done with, so why talk about it,” says one mother, Deborah. “I’ve learnt to live with it. Sometimes she opens up a bit later on in the day – usually when I’m on the phone and need her to be quiet!”
If you want to make sure you are across what’s going on in school, you must (yes, it’s that vital) check your child’s bag every day. Far too often your child will be carrying around an empty book bag, but every now and then, the teacher will give out a school letter and if you don’t check the bag, a vital piece of correspondence may end up squashed under the leaves or drawings for days on end.

Some schools also send out emails, but the book bag should always be your first port of call. Once you receive dates for school events (from dressing up for children’s book week to, er, dressing up for Egyptian Day), write them down straightaway on a calendar. That way your child won’t be the one whose bad mummy or daddy has forgotten…