Imagine you’re in church after the service. Your youth session went well, you had some good conversations and the Year-8 lads only got into one fight. The young people are busy hoovering up all the post-church biscuits when you see one of the parents making a bee-line for you, with a look of grim determination on their face. What do you do? Face the music for whatever you have done/not done/allowed the young people to do? Or hide in the toilets?
What kind of relationship do you have with the parents of the young people in your group? Do you only ever see them when they’re dropping their children off or when they have a complaint about something? Sometimes it can feel that we do youth work despite the parents of those in our group, not alongside them, but this is an incredibly unhelpful place to work in.
Working in this unhelpful place can partly be down to the parents or carers. The ‘dry cleaning’ approach to youth work is a fairly common mindset. Parents or carers drop their children off at our youth group and expect to get back a cleaned and fully pressed young Christian at the end of the session. In this case, there is little understanding on the part of parents or carers about the vital role of spiritual caregiver that they should be playing, and they can delegate it all to the church. And when they don’t get the service they’re expecting, they complain to us from a place of disappointment, anger and the sense that we’re not doing our job properly.
But this ‘us and them’ mentality can also be our fault. Recently, James Fawcett blogged about the idea that the young people in our groups are ‘ours’. This mentality can cause us to take on too much responsibility for our groups, to the point of setting ourselves up in opposition to parents and carers. We feel that we know best, not the parents. Taking this idea to the extreme, we have constant battles with parents (and our church leadership) over what the young people are doing/not doing, and how they are developing/not developing in their faith. We spurn all offer of help from parents, because it doesn’t fit with our ideas of what should happen.
If you’re in this difficult position, for whatever reason, then you need to start building bridges. But where to begin? Here are some starters:
- Organise a parents’ meeting. Make it at a time when most parents can attend, and present your vision for the youth work you’re involved in with their children. It’s likely that they’ll agree with what you’re trying to do. You can start from this shared understanding to develop further interaction and involvement.
- Outline what you can offer as a youth worker and what parents bring to the spiritual development of their children. Emphasise that you are there to help them as well as the young people.
- Keep the communication going. Ask one of your team to take responsibility for emailing parents with information about what’s happening at the group, and what spiritual material you have been exploring. You could use this communication to give parents helpful questions they could bring up with their children at opportune moments.
How else can we get a good relationship with parents going? What have you tried that has worked well? Share it with us in the comments or on Twitter (@DioLondonCYW)!
Alex Taylor is part of the Diocese of London’s children’s and youth team.