On the one hand, parents know their own children better than anyone else. They (usually) know their kids’ strengths and weaknesses inside and out.
On the other hand, parents have inherent reason to be biased - they probably love their kids more than anyone else loves those kids, and have inherent motive to see them succeed or be treated well.
So if Johnny’s parents tell you (a teacher, or principal, or whatever) that Johnny is a talented genius, would you believe that that is the case (without ever meeting Johnny)? If they give you a long 500-word description of who Johnny is (good or bad,) would you take it all at face value? If they tell you that their kid is handsome or beautiful (without showing a photo) - or, conversely, that their kid is ugly - would you assume the kid to be average looking?
I had a professor who told me that when they get their class evaluations after the semester is over, they take all the 10s (or whatever the highest score was, I don’t remember) and all the 0s and set them aside. The only ones that mattered were the ones in the middle, because they were written by people who had perspective.
If I was talking to a parent who couldn’t say anything bad about their child or couldn’t say anything good about their child, that would tell me something about the parent. If they had perspective, that would tell me something about the parent and the child.
Hell no. When my daughter was acting, lot of parents said that their kids could do it to if they had the time. By that point we could judge. They couldn’t. The one kid we thought could do it got picked up by her manager immediately.
Not that I was a better judge. When my daughter asked to go to an open call, I would have put her chances of getting signed at 1% or less. What did I know?
Parents are far more familiar w/ their kids over longer time and in more diverse situations than - say - a teacher. And some teachers are not great, lacking the ability to tell whether the kid is lacking or simply not a good fit with THAT teacher’s style and methods.
Of course, many parents are not great either. In fact, I suspect half of them might be below average.
Of course, many parents will be (intentionally or un) exaggerating their kid’s attributes and minimizing flaws, thinking that they are helping by doing so.
Also - kids lie. You have a pretty good idea of how they behave around you, but are really limited beyond that. A couple of examples I remember from when my kids (now in their 30s) were in grade school. I remember some little bastards who made my kids’ lives living hell. But when we tried to discuss it with them, they wouldn’t believe that their darlings were anything other than angels. From the other side, I recall an instance when my kid told me of how he was being picked on. I flew into action, only to receive clear proof that my kid was not blameless and was certainly not giving me the whole story.
We have raised our children to do their best, to always try their hardest. And they do a good job, but when we speak (not in front of our children) honestly about their abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and future paths we envision for them- brutally honestly given all we know- we have other parents (our friends, our own siblings) trying to build up our views of our children’s abilities. It is so awkward for them that we don’t think our children are Einstein and (Tom) Brady or Curie and Biles all rolled into one person, that they can’t not try to convince us otherwise. These are people who have known my children their whole lives and even they can’t be honest. So (most) parents are not capable of a fair assessment if even other nearby people are similarly blind in their assessments.
One of the things that makes it hard to “assess” my kids is that I (as a middle-aged father) do not interact with other kids their age very often.
That makes comparison difficult. I may think he is wonderful at everything, but I have no yardstick to compare him with (with exceptions like standardized tests).
One reason why I think it is so easy to be biased for your own kids: ***It is truly magical ***to see these weird little things (these eating/drooling/pooping blobs that just lay there) develop into a person that walks and talks and has independent and creative thoughts. They continue to amaze you. So they must be amazing!
However, everyone else just sees a mostly-normal looking 7 year old. Big deal.
Coming home from my first year in college, my father picked me up at the train station. He was wearing this funny look… “what’s up?” “I ran into your Physics teacher… and he guessed your grades!” No shit, I thought. I’d already told my parents what grades to expect back during the first month of the school year; my prediction matched my teacher’s. A man who’d taught me for a year knew me better than my parents did
I never knew the exact details, but I know that at one point I got hired sort-of against the factory manager’s preconceived notions: I know this because he did mention that my performance was certainly not what he’d been expecting based on how Dad talked about me.
As an engineer, I had to do a research or design “project” and defend it in an oral exam (a triad of teachers; my director and two others). Mine involved writing a series of computer programs that the Stats teacher needed (my project even got cited! sniff I feel so proud!). After my defense, a stunned Dad asked “you’ve done all that?” What did you think I was doing sitting at the computer all year long, play SimCity? Apparently.
If you’d talked to my mother more than 5 years ago, I was useless and refused to follow any directions from the Source of All Wisdom. Nowadays she claims that every professional decision I ever took (included some she took decades to forgive me for) was on her advice.
They are reliable witnesses in some respects, in that they can usually give you a better assessment of how things have proceeded over time - few others will have interacted with them from birth throughout primary school and secondary school. So they are useful and their information definitely should be included. That’s why they’re included as a key part of assessments for special educational needs, for example - and being a “genius” does sometimes count as a special educational need. But they’d still just be one port of call for information.
But if someone tried to convince me little Johnny was a genius, for anything other than just chatting to them, I’d expect that letter to include references to awards they’d won or other people who could back up their claims. I mean, for a start, if being considered a genius got them some advantages, they could be flat-out lying. There’s a reason parents (and I think other relatives) aren’t allowed to submit supporting letters for college applications.
For teenagers, parents fairly do not have a full picture of what’s going on with their kids, and sometimes that’s a good thing, because it means the kids are being allowed to live independent lives. But if a parent said, for example, “my kid has never done drugs” then I would never take that at face value. However, if they, as the person the teen lives with, can say that their child has never taken drugs in their house or come stoned, and has spoken out against drugs, or whatever, that doesn’t mean nothing either.
There are certainly situations where parents who know a child well can pick up on things outsiders would have difficulty with.
There are many examples of parents who refuse to recognize when their kids have misbehaved or committed crimes.
I know of a pediatrician (notorious for antivaccine views) whose motto is “no one knows your child better than you do.” A physician who essentially is advertising that he’s not a better judge of the medical needs of a child than its parents should find another profession.
Some are good at it, some aren’t. I would imagine there is a correlation between a parent who is honest in assessing their own strengths/weaknesses, and their ability to do the same with their (or any) kid. A disturbing number of people actually believe you can get good results if you nurture and focus only on the positive, secure in the knowledge it will overshadow the negative if only the kid tries hard enough. So when the kid fails or screws up, it’s not the parent’s fault, they did everything right.
I certainly know my childrens faults. I always, always catch my self giving excuses or reasons for them, in my head. I try not to but I can’t, That’s my perfect babies after all.
I never had to try and explain away bad behaviour to a teacher or employer. I’m pretty sure that they behaved at school. And they made good marks. But I do know their personality quirks and problematic behaviours. Either they’re not as bad as I think or they are good at hiding them.
It’s really not a yes-or-no question. What teachers learn from a parent is almost always valuable, though sometimes the valuable information is that the parents’ ego gets in the way of them realistically assessing their child, or that the parents are so resentful of school authority that they’ll fly to defend their kid’s actions instead of listening and trying to help their kid. But often parents provide pieces of the puzzle that helped me help their kids: the kid had always had trouble remembering what he’d read (a possible reading or processing problem), or the child studied but never did well on tests, or they had trouble motivating the kid.
I sure wouldn’t have disregarded what parents had to say.
You also have to remember the audience. I’m not going to insult my kid, or air his weaknesses, to random people–and I hope, especially when he gets older–he’d extend the same courtesy to me. You don’t talk shit about family behind their back. On the other hand, when I am talking to my mom, I think I have a pretty good handle on my son’s strengths and weaknesses. I am sure I have on rose-tinted glasses, but I don’t think I am like an order of magnitude off.
Likewise, I’ve taught high school almost two decades and have had innumerable parent conferences, and I’ve found that most parents, once they know you like their kid and want what’s best, have a pretty good handle on their kid.
This bothers me:
If multiple people you know are visibly uncomfortable–to the point that it’s awkward–with how negative and critical you are about your kids, you might consider if, in your scramble not to be too generous in your assessment, you’ve over-corrected. And I think it’s unlikely that none of that has gotten back to your kids.
I’ve also seen parents semi-consciously label their children and have a hard time letting go of those labels - e.g., “Robin is the smart one, Pat is the funny one, Chris is the generous one, etc.” And everything that the kids do gets filtered through those labels. So even while a more objective observer will note that Robin is kind of an average student while Pat is doing really well academically, that doesn’t fit the parents’ scripts. So the parents will give those kids strengths and weaknesses that they do not have in order to fit with the labels that they somehow acquired.
I think that parents are incredibly unreliable at evaluating their own kids; while they have a large collection of data, they also have huge biases. Way too many parents decide that their kid is either great or horrible, then sticks to that evaluation regardless of the data. There’s everything from parents insisting, insisting that their kid couldn’t possibly be bullying other kids, all the way to the classic ‘he’s a good kid’ said by a weeping mother at the trial after her little darling raped and/or killed someone.
As a youth sports coach for many years, I have found that parents fall into three categories when judging their own children:
those who overestimate their child’s abilities
those who have a realistic view of their child’s abilities
those who underestimate their child’s abilities
those who refuse to acknowledge/appreciate their child’s abilities
The sub-category for 1 and 3 is “reasonable” and “not reasonable”. #1 is somewhat understandable and generally can be worked with if reasonable, #3 is more unfortunate but also can be worked with if reasonable. Group 2 is a breath of fresh air and generally a joy to work with. Group 4 and the “not reasonables” are the ones that really made me feel sorry for their kid(s).
