What do you do when an adult in your child’s classroom says something mean to your child?

Today’s blog post is about an issue that I helped a parent deal with recently. It is unfortunate that issues like these occur in classrooms and at schools but they do happen. This is the second time I have helped a parent deal with this issue in the past two years. What do you do when an adult in the classroom like a teacher’s aide says something mean to your child? In this case, the teacher’s aide told the child, “you don’t know anything and I don’t want to work with you anymore.” Yes, this happened in a 3rd grade classroom just a couple of weeks ago and this happened to one of the parents that I work with on a regular basis. As you can imagine, the parent was very upset and she wanted to go to the school and yell at that person. I advised her that that was not an appropriate choice and we talked about some better options. I always advise parents to let the teacher know what happened just in case the teacher was not aware of what occurred. In addition, parents should contact the principal either in person or through email so that there is a paper trail of what happened. Then you can let the teacher and the principal handle it accordingly but they should always give an update to the parent as to what course of action was taken to resolve the situation. It’s a good idea to send an initial email or follow up email after speaking with someone in person so that there is record of what happened. I also advised this parent to speak to her child about how to not take these things personally when dealing with bullies whether they are adults or children!