When we first find out that our children are struggling, our greatest concern becomes about helping them to not struggle any more. This is what parents are designed for, we are there to raise our children so that they may have a beautiful life and an easy life.
So when the school finally talks to you about your son or daughter not being able to pass and worse, that they must look at attending a remedial school, we go into a state of panic. How could they? Why did they not say anything earlier?
As we come to grips with not being ‘allowed back in’ we start a grieving process.
When our children are battling the first thing we must understand is that we begin a very real grieving process. Typically mothers feel it first as they rush to protect their young. Fathers lag behind as they try to process what this means and often get stuck in denial.
Your process will start with denial, and this is maybe why schools like us only get to see half of the children when they are already 10 years old. Then you enter into the anger phase, the part when you fight with everyone about why, why, why and how could you… Once you have offended everyone at your current school (been there, done that) and now need to leave, you enter into the bargaining stage. As you start to look at options and possibilities within the current school you find them shutting down and shipping you off.
You’re almost done now but you must first go through a depression of sorts, a time when you start to look at how this could have happened and what you are supposed to do about it now.
If you have been lucky enough to pass through all of these phases you reach the other side and find acceptance. But it is not what you thought it would be and you may jump back into the cycle again until to reach real acceptance.
When you find that, you are ready to find the solution. Don’t mistake acceptance with apathy or resignation, in fact it is quite the opposite. When you know what is, you can find the what if’s. Don’t let anyone tell you there is no hope. Search for what is good and right and matches your view of the future and then commit. Commit wholeheartedly and never give up, it is all worth it!
Real acceptance, I think, is when you realise what education is really about and you start on the journey of discovery where your child finds strength, skills, abilities, self-esteem and success. At Omatas we think of success in a long term way, we are working with kids now in primary phases so that they can go to university. We are primarily concerned with building children with a strong self-esteem and an independent mind. We believe more in building weak areas than we do in building compensations. We believe in building a listener driven society where children chose to bring themselves to the classroom, be active participants in their education.
When education is alive and purposeful we develop in to so much more!