School-Family Partnership Centers Students’ Holistic Well-Being
Story by Victoria Muradi, Director of Strategic Initiatives | Photos by Dylan Howlett and Meka Hemmons
Strengthening the home-school partnership has been among Durham Academy’s institutional priorities. A comprehensive audit of school events by a Family Association task force identified opportunities to improve communication about school initiatives and programming, provide feedback and create parent education opportunities based on themes reflected in the 2023 End-of-Year Family Survey.
On Aug. 31, we launched Family Matters @ DA, which is designed to:
- Prepare for important developmental stages in our students’ pre-kindergarten-to-12 journey
- Understand the work of the school
- Connect parents/caregivers with one other
This year’s events have included virtual Family Conversations with Head of School Michael Ulku-Steiner and Associate Head of School Kristen Klein; divisional coffees hosted by school directors; time with the school’s experts; and prominent speakers.
During the spring semester, we hosted two authors. Caralena Peterson, author of The Effortless Perfection Myth, spoke to all Upper School students and faculty about perfectionism’s potentially detrimental effects on student mental health, as well as more than 100 parents about supporting students’ mental health and well-being at home. Sixty parents/caregivers heard from Dr. Devorah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World and Screenwise, about strategies to help their children build lasting, constructive habits around social media usage and screen time. Most events were recorded and are available on the Family Matters resource page url.da.org/familymatters, which includes a number of helpful resources for current parents.
“It’s important as parents to recognize that it’s really easy to overlook the child or the friend who by all outside measures is absolutely kicking butt. I think sometimes we look at our students and think, well, they have straight A’s, so they’re good. And sometimes there’s a little more going on under the surface. …
Success is an experience, not an identity. … When success is framed as an identity, it causes us to shy away from the risks that are necessary to growth. That’s harmful to true success in the long term. I wanted to make sure the students knew that they should be using their time at Durham Academy to stretch their capabilities and abilities — and that it’s important to think about the tradeoffs you’re making in the meantime. An Ivy League acceptance is not worth your sanity, and I am not saying that facetiously. I was recently speaking to a student at Harvard, who said, ‘This is a really hard place to be. But it’s a great place to be from.’ Yeah. Life is not supposed to feel like a never-ending boot camp. Accomplishment is not a cure-all. Make sure your kids know that.”
— Caralena Peterson, author of The Effortless Perfection Myth
Read more about Peterson’s time with DA students, faculty and parents/caregivers at url.da.org/peterson.
“We do a lot of threatening around reputation. And we’ll say to kids, ‘Oh, you’ll never have a great career,’ or ‘You’ll never be able to go to that fancy college you want to go to if you post the bad thing.’ There are a bunch of reasons I don’t think that’s a very good message for kids, especially not as the lead message.
One is that it’s frankly untrue; I worked in admissions when I was a grad student at Northwestern, and we’re not doing a NSA-style deep dive on students. Your student who’s applying to college is lucky to get six to 10 minutes of consideration by an admissions committee. They’re certainly not trying to figure out what their Discord handle is and tracking them all over the internet.
The other reason — and I think this is more important — is when we say to kids, ‘You won’t get into X college or have Y job if you post that,’ we’re saying to kids, ‘Don’t get caught.’ Now, that’s not the message we probably think we’re sending, but that’s the message we’re actually sending when we say that. What we want to say to kids is, ‘Don’t do harm. Don’t cause harm.’ …
Here’s the thing: We may not know for a long time if our kid got caught, and many kids do harmful things online and don’t get caught and don’t experience a consequence like not getting into college. And that doesn’t mean it’s OK with you and with them if they’re really thinking about it. We want to get away from a message about consequences and focus instead on character. Does what you posted or commented on or shared reflect the kind of person, friend, classmate that you are? If in doubt, don’t share it out.”
— Dr. Devorah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public and Screenwise