It Takes Parents a Year to ‘Tune in’ to their Child’s Feelings About Starting School, Research Suggests

Image by Andrej Lišakov for Unsplash+.

A team of psychologists have found that it takes parents and guardians about a year, on average, to attune to their child’s attitudes towards school once they start education.

This research is the inspiration behind a new picture book, aimed at giving parents a better understanding of their child’s experiences of the crucial first year of school. The book follows a major study which shows, in fact, by Year 1, parental perceptions of how a child feels about school most closely match responses given by the child when they were in Reception class a year earlier.

The psychologist team say that this can give a “misleading picture” of a child’s introduction to education, especially if children only talk about school when they have a bad day.

Now, some of the researchers have teamed up with writer Anita Lehmann and artist Karin Eklund to create this book designed to help parents and legal guardians better understand their child’s emotional state during that first year of school and help them adapt as key stages kick in.

How I Feel About My School is based on findings from the Ready or Not Study – a series of academic papers by teams led by Professor Claire Hughes at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

One of the papers included two waves of interviews with over 200 children in Reception and Year 1, from more than 100 UK primary schools.

Along with a series of tasks that measure cognitive skills and wellbeing, the youngsters were guided through simple, emoji-based questionnaires about how different aspects of the school day make them feel.

A parent or caregiver (predominantly mothers) also completed interviews about their child that covered everything from mood to sociability, and attitudes to school.

When assessing pupils in Reception, Hughes and colleagues found little affinity between children’s thoughts and feelings about school and how their caregivers believed they felt about it.

By Year 1, levels of agreement between children and adults had more than doubled on average, although significant gaps remained. Year 1 responses from parents often matched those given by their children the previous year.

Over both years, researchers found the biggest gaps between the outlooks of parent and child were parents overestimating how happy children are in the classroom, and underestimating how happy children feel in the playground.

“We found a clear and wide gap between how parents think their children feel about the first year of school, and how children actually feel about school,” says Professor Hughes, Deputy Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Research.

“Our research shows that it typically takes parents a year to tune into their child’s experiences of school. By Year 1, parents are often only just catching up to where their children were a year earlier.”

“We wanted to create a book that can help parents connect with their child’s feelings about school much earlier,” adds Hughes, “Parents get a misleading picture if children are motivated to talk about their school day only when something has upset them.”

The new picture book follows four young children through a day at school, from arriving at the gates through to playtime, quiet time and show-and-tell. It has incidents along the way including lunchtime disagreements and classroom collaborations.

The book’s characters display a variety of behaviours and traits to allow children with a range of personality types to recognise themselves, say the authors. The book has built-in prompts to get children talking more meaningfully about their school day, and how it left them feeling.

“We want to normalise difference. Kids have ups and downs in a day for lots of reasons,” said Hughes. “There can be a tendency to over-medicalise sadness, but getting through a school day is a big deal for children, and problems are a natural part of that.”

Initial Ready or Not findings were published in The Psychology of Starting School.

Further new findings, just published in the journal Developmental Psychology, suggest that children’s wellbeing at school declines on average between Reception and Year 1. This is perhaps unsurprising for a UK cohort, says Hughes, as Reception is play-based, whereas reading and writing requirements begin in Year 1, so children start to experience the demands of the curriculum.

“A closer understanding of how a child feels about starting school will allow parents to gauge wellbeing and help their child adapt as key stages kick in,” said Hughes. “Happy children are better learners, and the first years of school can set the tone.”

The published findings from Ready or Not show that greater wellbeing as reported by the child in Reception class predicted higher levels of “self-concept” – how confident a child feels about their ability to read, write and count – by time they are in Year 1.

Hughes points to other UK studies suggesting that children who say they enjoy school at age six tend to achieve better academic outcomes by age sixteen, including higher GCSE exam grades.

“If children can have a positive couple of years at the beginning of school and we can really protect that time for building up their enthusiasm and their confidence, then when things do get more serious, the children are willing to embrace it,” said Hughes.

“We hope the picture book will promote conversations about what happened at lunchtime or in the playground, giving parents a better understanding of their child’s enjoyment of school, and building up an emotional literacy for children.”