When it to comes to school shootings and school safety, parents need a reality check. Pestering principals constantly about perceived dangers may seem like positive parenting, but in reality it’s paranoid parenting that is collectively having a detrimental effect on our schools and on our principals’ ability to run their schools.
When I opened my Paranoid Parent Stop Worrying Shoppe in Denver, within days, a number of school principals (NOT MY OWN PRINCIPAL) had come in to thank me for announcing seminars for parents on not worrying. They begged me to print our talks and topics or to write a book. They said that the majority of their time was spent dealing with paranoid parents, demanding solutions to what is perceived through the media as a danger – like school shootings – but is no threat at all.
School is one of the safest places for children to be. The dangers at high risk schools skew the averages but schools are very safe.
They complained of parents insisting their children had specific places in sit in each class that was supposedly the most ‘shooter-proof’. Other parents demanded $250,000 budgets be raised to make the school safer than Fort Knox, when school shooting incidents do not average one a year.
Other principal complaints were that parents made them spend one morning a month to go over with parents the ‘predator’ list. They wanted the principal to report on new pedophiles that had moved into the school district each month.
Parents can check the pedophile register if inclined, but in my school district, for example, there were 4 offenders on the pedophile register. Three had records from when they were eighteen sleeping with their slightly younger girlfriends. One was a ‘serious’ offender. Parents stepped in and stopped him working as the ‘balloon man’ at the local grocery store. The grocery store thought that allowing him to greet the kids with balloons would show that the convicted pedophile was reformed. The parents were right to complain but it wasn’t the school principal’s job. Principals need to be using their time to run their schools.
The principals said irrational paranoid parents overly concerned about school safety were clouding funding decisions as well as daily school and educational operations.
This carries over into college. College advisors, RA’s, I interviewed said that paranoid helicopter parents hover, renting condos nearby college to look after their freshman.
Those without on-campus hovering parents were having trouble too. Some students had never slept a single night away from home – no sleepovers, no camp, no staying over with the grandparents. Their first night away from home was their first night at college. Others had never been to a concert or even a movie with friends before arriving at college.
I deal with these paranoid parents and the often entitled but helpless teens and college kids they have created in my book “Paranoid Parents Guide”, released in September. The book isn’t just for new parents of little children. It also looks at some of ways to create a child who can control his world and not be terrified of it.
Isn’t that the kind of children we want to raise? Those kind of children come from parents who are not paranoid about every little thing.
A big thanks to school principals. They put up with a lot from some of us parents. I personally thank Amanda Waleski our principal who puts up with a lot (from me) and runs our school brilliantly. Student confidentiality sometimes ties her hands for disclosing how problems are being handled.
We parents need to be aware of the legislation and codes principals must follow. But great school safety results speak for themselves.
