Episode 177: Your Kid Forgot To Zip Their Coat And Now Everyone Is Mad

Teachers are sounding the alarm about young kids who struggle with basic independence, and parents are hearing it as one more accusation. I take a different route: I look at the bigger picture behind why teachers are blaming parents and why stress may be a major part of the backstory behind these school readiness gaps.

I start with what early educators are reporting about life skills and social-emotional development, then I juxtapose those observations against the day-to-day reality of modern family life. Dual-income schedules, after-school logistics, homework support, and bedtime routines can leave families with almost no breathing room, and technology keeps work creeping into home time. I also name the parallel stress teachers carry when they spend the day helping dysregulated children regulate, which can create a cycle of frustration on both sides unless we build better, judgment-free communication.

Then I go deeper into why “parent blaming” is not just unhelpful, but historically dangerous, especially for parents of color. I connect today’s school narratives to long-standing family deficit models that push assimilation, ignore cross-cultural strengths, and distract from inequitable systems. Finally, I share concrete action steps to build resilience and self-efficacy at home by letting kids practice everyday life skills, fail safely, and try again until independence becomes normal.

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Purpose

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Welcome to another episode of K-12 Public Education Insights, Empowering Parents of Color Podcast. The podcast that converges at the intersection of educational research and parental actions. It's about making the trends, topics, and theories in public education understandable so that you can implement them into practical, actionable strategies that work for your children. My name is Dr. Kim J. Fields, former corporate manager, turned education researcher, and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microaggressions that I faced as an African-American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress. This battle-tested experience is what I provide as action steps for you to take. It's like enjoying a bowl of educational research with a sprinkling of motherwood wisdom on top. If you're looking to find out more about the current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, and the action steps you can take to give your children the advantages they need, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K-12 public education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. Give me 30 minutes or less, and I'll provide insights on the latest trends, issues, and topics pertaining to this constantly evolving K-12 public education environment. Teachers and parents are experiencing similar levels of stress when caring for and educating their children. In episode 171, I talked about how teachers are blaming parents for young learners' deficiencies in basic life skills, but in this episode, I look at this from a different perspective. The bigger picture behind why teachers are blaming parents. This bigger issue may be stress experienced by parents as well as educators. Stress affects all areas of our lives, but could it be one of the reasons behind why young children are not successfully completing childhood milestones? In this episode, I discussed the backstory behind why young learners are coming to school with independence deficits and the interrelationship between stress and parenting. I also discussed why the parent blaming game continues and why it is detrimental to us as a nation. I wrap up the discussion by addressing the need to build resilience and independence in your children. Let's gain some insight on this. Here's a little background. In a 2026 National Online Survey conducted by the Education Week Research Center of more than 1,100 early educators who work with pre-K through third graders, the respondents gave their young students low marks in a number of areas from social emotional skills to performance on basic tasks that typically indicate age-appropriate independence. The comments provided by the survey respondents fueled the perception that permissive parenting may play a role in why the students lack skills demonstrating independence. According to a 2025 report by Hungarian psychologists, there is a positive correlation between permissive parenting style and an increase of risk in emotional dysregulation among children. Yet, even though early elementary teachers spend countless hours with their students, their observations represent only one side of the story. What teachers don't see is how families spend hours outside of the school day. So perhaps a closer look at the daily realities of many families with young children may be helpful in reframing teachers' perceptions of blame. The reality is that families face tight schedules during school days. Many of you are in two-parent households with young children and you both have professional full-time jobs as well as sharing parenting duties. A typical workday schedule may be something like this. At 6:45 a.m., you're starting to wake your kids so that they get ready to go to school or preschool. One child may need to be at school at 8 o'clock in the morning and another at preschool by 8:30 a.m. One parent may work remotely after dropping the kids off, and the other takes the train or bus or subway or car to get to his or her job. Between 2.30 and 3:30 p.m., the parent who works from home leaves to go pick up the kids from daycare and school or after school care. If the kids are in extracurricular activities like sports or dance or other such activities, this parent drives them to these activities to participate in for the next 45 minutes to an hour. When they get home around 4:30 or 5 o'clock p.m., activities surrounding homework and supportive academic exercises entail one-on-one attention and support. Then comes dinner and bedtime routines, with everything winding down between 7.30 and 8 o'clock p.m. after story time. This is a typical schedule during the weekdays. This tightly scheduled, time-constrained weekday routine that dominates the work week is quite common in dual earning households with young children. The cost of raising a family today often requires both parents in a household to work full-time. As a result, dual-income households have become the norm. Employment rates among fathers of children under six have remained high at about 95%, while employment rates of mothers of young children have risen steadily, unless you're a black mother these days. The number of black women that are unemployed signals a danger point for society, just like the canary in the coal mine. But that's a topic for another day. And outside the scope of this podcast episode, unless you want me to talk about it overall on the podcast, let me know. So let's talk numbers. In 1980, just under half of all mothers with children under six were employed. By 1990, it was 58%. In 2000, it was 65%. By 2025, that percentage rose to 68%. And for mothers of children under the age of three, participating in the workforce nearly doubled in recent decades, from 34% in 1975 to 64% in 2021. In married households where mothers of young children are employed, the time that both parents cumulatively spend with children at home dips by about one hour, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. The details may explain why. In households where both parents work full-time, the father spends an average of one and a half hours daily at home caring for their children under six that drops to a little over one hour daily among working fathers whose wives are not employed. Mothers with children under six spend an average of two and a half hours daily care for their children at home if they work full-time and three and a half hours daily when they are not employed. The bottom line is this parents and teachers of young children are stressed. Modern technology, including emails, texts, video calls, etc., has blurred the boundaries between work and home, making it harder for parents to fully disconnect when they are at home. This contributes to stress. Nearly half of all parents regularly feel overwhelming stress, according to data from the American Psychological Association. Work-life balance presents one of the most common challenges of millennial age parents. And I get it. Been there, done that. That's why I coach high achieving, mid-career, professional moms of color, on creating integration between work and life because there's no such thing as balance, really. But there can be a harmonious integration. You can reach out to me on my website, noexcusescoaching.com, to learn more about how I can support you. In any case, it is time for companies, organizations, and corporate America to build better family-oriented infrastructures to support working families, including paid parental leave, flexible work policies, and paid child care. The stress also affects teachers. When they are regulating dysregulated children, they may experience dysregulation themselves. Therefore, regular, judgment-free conversations between educators and families can help bridge any perception gaps as well as better support the young children that both of these groups are working hard to care for. Stress has always been a part of modern life, but in the United States, recent surveys suggest that it is becoming a defining feature of daily living for millions of people. A majority of Americans say that their stress levels have increased over the past five years, according to the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey. 75% of the respondents to the survey reported having physical or emotional symptoms related to stress. This is a sustained upward trend fueled by a mix of economic uncertainty, political polarization, public health challenges, and personal financial strain. Gallup's Global Emotions Report of 2023 found that about 49% of Americans experience significant daily stress, which is one of the highest traits among high income nations. And for content, that's nearly one in every two adults walking through life with a daily undercurrent of tension. The notable impacts of these stresses include anxiety, sleep disruption, burnout, reduced productivity, absenteeism, delayed health care visits, or preventive care visits, emotional fatigue, and social withdrawal. The American work culture is a major contributor to the stress epidemic. Remote work, which many hoped would reduce stress, has created its own challenges. Blurred boundaries between work and personal life mean people are always on, answering emails late at night and skipping breaks. So who feels stressed the most? Gen Z faces job insecurity stress as well as stressors like climate anxiety, debt, and cost of living. Millennials face stressors like work-life balance, child care costs, and the housing market. They face significant burnout in mid-career. Gen X faces stress like health concerns and retirement readiness. They are often caring for both children and aging parents. And baby boomers face stressors like health expenses and fixed income pressures. They feel slightly lower stress overall, but higher health-related anxiety. Younger adults often feel the squeeze from unstable job markets, student debt, and the cost of starting families, while older adults face stress tied to health and financial stability in retirement. Each generation experiences stress differently, but no group is untouched. Statistics may give us the scale of the problem, but they don't capture the lived experiences like a parent cutting back on groceries to pay for their child's medical bill. The worker lying awake at night before a performance review, or a recent graduate wondering how they'll ever afford rent. Stress in America is not a passing problem, it is a structural issue that has been presenting itself for decades. It's tied to economics, culture, and public policy. Managing stress isn't just a personal responsibility, it is a societal one. The conversation about stress could be a multi-episode series in and of itself, but I'm not going into it at that level of depth. What I want to convey is that stress affects parenting, and this may be part of the backstory to why young learner deficits exist. Yet the blame game continues. Blaming parents of color for their own oppression and therefore parenting outcomes is an American pastime. The United States has a long history of removing non-white children from families and incarcerating families of color who are positioned as a threat. For hundreds of years in America, black children were stripped from their parents' arms and auctioned off as slaves. The incarceration of Japanese American families during the Second World War in internment camps is another well-known and devastating example of presidential policies that support these types of actions. And for generations, the United States government targeted Native American communities with child separation policies to force compliance and assimilation. Why do these kinds of policies and actions continue to arise in this country? And what sort of ideas enable them? While racist, white supremacists, anti-immigration ideologies are certainly factors, one overarching concept is a pattern of blaming parents and caregivers to justify the systemic inequities and inhumane treatment of non-white and poor families. In the extreme cases, like those that we have seen under the current administration, parent and caregiver blaming can be used to justify the removal of children. The Trump administration has criminalized parents and caregivers, removed their children, and allowed some Americans to profit from this profound injustice. In more subtle forms, parent blaming narratives are used to propose and advance policies intended to compel non-white or poor families to adopt mainstream white values and norms. These narratives suggest that poor outcomes for children of color are the fault of poor child rearing, not of inequitable assistance. Until the 1940s, the United States government forcibly removed generations of Native American children from their families and communities and placed them in boarding schools in assimilationist efforts to quote unquote kill the Indian, save the man. When the boarding school era began in the second half of the 19th century, the so-called quote unquote Indian problem was twofold. Native Americans were not assimilating into U.S. culture, and they had land and resources Americans wanted. So the children were taken great distances from their parents, severely physically, emotionally, and sexually abused, often as punishment for speaking their tribal language or for practicing their tribal culture. The policy justification for native children's removal often involved claims that the parents were not properly educating their children, and so it was the settlers' moral and ethical responsibility to do so. Now this has always fascinated me. My overarching question is, where does this false sense of moral superiority and ethical responsibility from the dominant culture come from? These early forms of child removal were eventually recognized as inhumane. Unfortunately, they were replaced by other forms of child removal with similar effects. Following the boarding school era, child protective services routinely removed native children and placed them with white families. The majority of these children were removed for no more reason than that their family was poor and did not utilize traditional white, middle class child rearing processes and practices. To this day, child protective services continue to disproportionately take children from families of color and low income families into foster care for many of the same reasons. Beyond just the family separation policies, parent blaming narratives are applied to families routinely across many American institutions. In education, for example, policy directives and education. Often blame parents and caregivers for all kinds of disparate outcomes, including student attendance, behavior issues, suspension, and academic underperformance. At the core, these narratives suggest that disparate outcomes for children of color are the fault of poor child rearing, not of inequitable systems. Many times these narratives are used to coerce families to comply with the white middle class cultural models privileged in public schools. In educational context, these narratives are often masked as deficit models for families of color and low-income families that position caregivers and their home lives as the source of educational disparities. For example, programs aimed at teaching parenting skills to poor parents and parents of color have proliferated across this country. These programs often claim that poor families and families of color don't talk to, play with, or stimulate their children in the quote-unquote right way. And thus should be taught how to do these things. These efforts persist despite research demonstrating cross-cultural variability and healthy child development. Educational practices and policies rooted in these parent-blaming and family deficit models aim to manipulate students and families into compliance, to assimilate and adopt mainstream cultural values or pay the consequences. However, such efforts largely fail to produce the touted outcomes and instead, at best, prevent students of color from identifying with school while perpetuating their families' distrust of educational systems with good reason. In order to stop these destructive narratives, each of us must fulfill our moral responsibility and refuse the family deficit models as the foundation for theories of action toward educational change. When our legal system violates basic human decency, they also highlight the ways in which the seeds of these policies are sprinkled throughout our legal, educational, and social systems. Healthy communities and by extension, healthy nations rest on healthy families. There's no formula for a healthy family. They can be small or extended. A single parent, head of household, co-parents, or multigenerational, among other possibilities. How the systems see and support families to thrive matters and sets the groundwork for who we can become as a nation. Because let's face it, we cannot go back to the way things were. Those things got us to where we are now. Now let's move from listening to this discussion to applying it. Because my main goal of this podcast is to inform you and mobilize you to take action. So, what can you do about the information that I just shared? Here are the action steps you can take regarding the backstory for why young learners' independence deficits exist. For many years, I was a single parent head of household with two young children. Teaching my kids to be independent was one of my primary goals. The environment that I set in our home developed the basis for their resilience and self-efficacy. Resilience is the dynamic process of adapting in the face of threats and or adversity. Self-efficacy refers to a person's belief in their ability to control events in their lives through good performance. Self-efficacy is a factor of resilience. It promotes resilience by turning effort into action and perseverance in the face of failures. Resilience in education includes factors such as optimism, problem solving skills, motivation for success, self-control, having goals and aspirations, and assertiveness. Giving your child the opportunity to fail at simple tasks like zipping and unzipping their clothes, tying their shoes, and putting away the items in their backpacks are skills that promote problem solving and self-control. Rewarding them once they have accomplished these tasks is motivation for success. Their success is measured through perseverance, attentiveness, and self-control. The various roles of being a parent don't change, even though they may be stressful at times. Those roles include providing safety and nourishment, social and emotional support, encouragement for success that ensures competence and commitment to life improving goals, supervision, structure such as family routines and rituals, and a means of social connectedness with family and friends. These roles are interconnected and critical to healthy child development. By establishing productive relationships with their schools and the people in them, including peers and teachers, children can overcome behavioral, psychological, and educational challenges. So practice patience while allowing your child to build independence through mastering life skills. If they don't succeed in a task, let them try it again. They will feel a sense of accomplishment when they complete the task, and you'll be happy that they are applying their learning in practical ways because they are taking on personal responsibility to achieve a goal. Who wouldn't want a child who is self-reliant? You might find that you feel less stressed. Here are this episode's takeaways. Even though early elementary teachers spend countless hours with their students, their observations represent only one side of the story of why young learners have deficits in independent life skills. What teachers don't see is how families spend hours outside of the school day. Perhaps a closer look at the daily realities of many families with young children may be helpful in reframing teachers' perceptions of blame. Modern technology, including emails, texts, video calls, etc., has blurred the boundaries between work and home, making it harder for parents to fully disconnect when they are at home. This contributes to stress. Nearly half of all parents regularly feel overwhelming stress, and work life balance presents one of the most common challenges for millennial age parents. This stress also affects teachers. When they are regulating dysregulated children, they may experience dysregulation themselves. Therefore, regular, judgment-free conversations between educators and families can help bridge any perception gaps as well as better support the young children that both of these groups are working hard to care for. Educational practices and policies rooted in parent blaming and family deficit models aim to manipulate students and families into compliance, to assimilate and adopt mainstream cultural values or pay the consequences. However, such efforts largely failed to produce the touted outcomes and instead, at best, prevent students of color from identifying with school while perpetuating their families' distrust of educational systems. In order to stop these destructive parent-blaming narratives, each of us must fulfill our moral responsibility and refuse the family deficit models as the foundation for theories of action toward educational change. When our legal system violates basic human decency, they also highlight the ways in which the seeds of these policies are sprinkled throughout our legal, educational, and social systems. Healthy communities and by extension, healthy nations rest on healthy families. There's no formula for a healthy family. They can be small or extended, a single parent head of household, co-parents, or generational or multi-generational families, among other possibilities. How the systems see and support families to thrive matters and sets the groundwork for who we can become as a nation. What are your thoughts on the issue of stress and parenting and how it affects your teaching of independent life skills for your children? Let me know your thoughts by leaving me a text comment on my podcast website, k12educationinsights.bussproute.com. Here's how you can leave that text comment. Go to the episode description page and click on the Send Me a Text Message link. Again, it's K12Education Insights.busRoute.com. If you enjoyed this episode, why not listen to another episode from my catalog? It could take as little as 15 minutes of your day. And remember, new episodes come out every Tuesday. Thanks for listening today. Be sure to come back for more insights on K-12 educational topics that impact you and your children. And remember to share my podcast with anyone you think will find valuable. That includes your friends, family, and your community. Until next time, learn something new. Every day.