Parent/Teacher contact - Something that should be rare

While many groups over the years, including PTAs and the NAACP, have pushed for constant parent involvement in the school system, common sense should tell them and everyone else to stay out of it. Constant parental involvement stunts the growth of the students it is supposed to assist.

When parents email their child's teacher about whether or not their child has turned in homework or gotten a good test grade, they stunt that child's growth. If your child is in the first grade and you need to check to see if their homework was turned in, that's fine. By middle school however, your child needs to be responsible for their own work. Good, college bound students are able to stay on top of their own school work by the age of 12. When parents hound teachers about homework grades, it denies their child the opportunity to grow up and be held accountable for their own success. Preteens and teenagers today are more immature than ever. We now live in a world where parents write their children's college admission essays. Parents need to step aside and let their children shine - and sometimes, let them fail. Every time a mother emails her middle school student's teacher to make sure she did her homework and read the book for class, she isn't ensuring that child's success. She's ensuring that child's failure by saying, "Hey, if you screw up, I'll step in and make sure you are on track." Rather than learn to write down her homework and be responsible with turning it on time, she learns that mommy will remember the homework for her and badger the teacher to take the homework late so that she can complete the homework whenever she feels like it.

This is not a recipe for successful, smart teens. This is a recipe for adults that don't understand a deadline is a deadline and that the electric bill due date is not negotiable.