Why are some Waldorf school parents so emotional?

Parents love and want the best for their children. They live vicariously through their children’s experiences, good and bad, and defend and protect their children vigilantly. All of this, healthfully pursued, is noble, good, and understandable.

The emotions that attend parent experiences in Waldorf schools, however, seem more frequently than at other schools to spill over into extremes.

Sometimes, parents who apply to a Waldorf school have their child rejected, and then seem, instantly, to develop animosity to the school, a school they were almost desperate to be part of moments before; their hopes were high, then their hearts were broken. By contrast, parents of applicants rejected by local prep schools are much more likely to be upset but still to hold the school in high esteem; and, if a place there opens in the future, to send their children. Those rejected by a Waldorf school may form a negative impression that they carry for years. They don’t just feel rejected, they feel ill-used.

Or parents enter a Waldorf school community with tremendous energy, enthusiasm, and idealism, only to have their perceptions change a couple of years later when they realize that the school actually doesn’t, can’t, live up to their image of it. In my experience, this process is more intense than the general “burnout” that parents who volunteer at any school can feel. And schools contribute to this phenomenon—maybe even cause it—by allowing expectations to be so high. Out of insecurity, perhaps, Waldorf schools may represent ideals, far more than they can ever deliver, without offering a healthy dose of reality.

Or parents withdraw their students—sometimes for perfectly valid reasons, and sometimes for reasons that have more to do with adult interactions and not with a child’s experience in school—and badmouth the school for years afterward. Again, by comparison, parents who leave a more conventional school may blame a teacher or an administrator or a social dynamic, but they are less likely, I believe, to blame the school as a whole.

In all of these cases, it seems as if the emotions attached to the experiences are greater than the emotions attached to parallel experiences at another school—Montessori, Country Day, public school.

I have two interlocking theories about why this is so.

First, the idealism and even zealotry of the convert can be dangerous. To the extent that parents act as “converts” to Waldorf education and see Waldorf schools as “more” than just schools, or to the extent that Waldorf schools raise parents’ expectations too high, higher than the schools can ever fulfill, they are in for an awakening down the road. Many families navigate this terrain well, but for a few it provides a shock from which they don’t easily recover.

Second, parents see the world through their children’s eyes and occasionally forget that it’s not appropriate for an adult to see the world only as a third or seventh grader sees it. Research demonstrates, for example, that children lose confidence or faith in school between third and fourth grade. Whether we call this evidence of a “nine year change” or something else, it’s a genuine phenomenon. Teachers see it all the time. Children who loved school and loved their teachers in second grade begin to question these things in third and fourth grade. A parent invested in perfection just can’t stand to hear the words—perhaps uttered more as a test than as a fact, “I hate my teacher.” The teacher is the same one of whom the student said the year before, “I love my teacher.” Usually it’s the student who is changing, of course, not the teacher. (This is not an argument for parent blindness—not all teachers are good teachers for every student, and no parent should be so zealous as to keep a child in a class or school against better judgment.)

And parents don’t just lend undue credence to the reports of their children, they often affect the behavior of their children, as well. I have seen seventh grade parents, upset with children’s behavior that caused hurt feelings and schisms in the class, behave to each other exactly in order to create hurt feelings and schisms among the parents. A rule of thumb for teachers and administrators might be, parents may look like adults, but, when pushed, will behave like the children in whom they have such a great stake.

I don’t say this to insult parents (I have two children myself, and my wife frequently used to ask, “How can you be so good with other people’s children, and so obtuse with your own?”) but to warn of unconscious behavior that can only make some difficult situations worse.

What do you think?