Don’t Be Friends With Your Child’s Teacher on Social Media
This year, I saw my son’s fourth grade teacher in person exactly once – and this time was an accident, when I signed him to school after a morning doctor’s appointment, and she accidentally walked into the office to collect some documents. In addition, I had one virtual parent-teacher conference with her, I watched a few video messages she sent to parents at the start of the school year, and I would sometimes catch a glimpse of Zoom as I walk past my son’s coffee table.
Because of our isolation during the pandemic, we all felt compelled to communicate virtually with each other to a greater extent. Work life is family life and home life is work life, and what other boundaries? Maybe you’re even thinking about connecting with your child’s teachers on social media – hey, that’s another way to stay connected and communicate a little more personally during these times, right?
However, before you click to add them as friends on Facebook or Instagram, or ask them to subscribe to their personal Twitter feed, pause for a moment. Then maybe don’t do it.
They are embarrassed
I’m not a teacher, but at the risk of speaking on behalf of the teachers and being completely wrong (which is unlikely), they probably are n’t looking for friends with 20 new groups of parents they barely know on their personal pages every school year. They have children of their own who may also attend school or other activities with your children and whose privacy they must protect no matter what.
They spend happy hour with their friends, they write juicy romantic posts to their partners on the occasion of their anniversary, and they take pictures on the beach in their bathing suits. They may love to share it all with their friends and family, but do they want to share it with Aiden’s mom and Molly’s dad? Doubtful.
Plus … politics. Julie Mason, instructor and former high and high school teacher writes the following for WeAreTeachers :
If you use Facebook to express your opinion on politics, religion, or current affairs, you may be concerned that your parents will disagree with you. Or worse, they may fear that you will share certain points of view with your students. If you accept parental requests, your Facebook page may change from private and personal to public and professional. If you don’t want to doubt yourself every time you post, don’t accept parental friend requests.
Even if some teachers want to accept your request, many schools and districts have rules that prohibit them from doing so, which means they must either reject your request without comment (embarrassing) or tell you that they are sorry but they the director said no (also awkward).
This is an invasion of your child’s privacy
Your kids may not care now that you are social media friends with their second grade teacher, but they may care by the time they move into third or fourth grade. Children rightfully become more sensitive to the images and information we share about them on the Internet as they get older. And just as adults draw the line between the professional and the personal, children should reserve the right to keep their home life separate from social life at school.
Our children have to choose what to tell teachers and classmates about their personal lives, including how they spent the weekend or what they did during the holidays. Even if they want to share something, it must come from them. If they come to school and their teacher already knows they have a new puppy before they can blurt it out, it will be a bit of a disappointment.
This really isn’t necessary
Perhaps the best argument for not trying to befriend your child’s teacher on private social media channels is that there is often no good reason to do so. At the start of the school year, you were almost certainly given information on how to communicate with them, whether it be an email address, a phone number, or a classroom communication app like ClassDojo . These are the channels they will track for messages from their parents, not Facebook Messenger or their Twitter messages.
Each teacher will have a different level of comfort when connecting to social media. Some preschool teachers may want the toddlers they teach to grow over the years; some high school teachers may not mind accepting student requests after they finish their studies. But many more people will feel like they are crossing the border and it will be uncomfortable for them.
The exception is when they have created a public profile or cool Facebook group that they encourage parents to join and participate in. For example, I have a friend who is a fourth grade teacher and she has a personal Instagram account where she posts pictures of her children and she has a public “teacher” account dedicated to her class photos, message board designs and selfies during Weeks of the Spirit. It’s a fair game. However, everything outside the privacy wall must remain there.