Why are we having so many hard conversations?

If you feel like tensions are higher than ever before, you’re not alone. Parents and school staff alike are stressed, and relationships are fracturing. 

In the fall of 2024, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about unprecedented levels of stress and mental health concerns among parents and caregivers. Parents are working longer hours, they’re financially strained, and they’re worried about their children’s health and safety. That’s not to mention the effects of technology. The amount of parenting advice online is overwhelming, and many families are concerned about the negative effect social media is already having on today’s youth. In a 2023 Pew Research survey, over three-quarters of parents expressed worry that their children might someday experience anxiety or depression. 

And school staff are under immense pressure, too. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, 44% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. said they “often” or “always” felt burned out. And the current political climate surrounding education isn’t helping. “The nation’s K-12 schools aren’t strangers to culture wars,” reads an Education Week article titled “How Politics Are Straining Parent-School Relationships.” “But new disputes about transparency in curriculum and the role of the general public in what schools do every day have been supercharged by prominent politicians, the pandemic, divisions about race, and other factors.” 

But all is not lost. Despite consistently increasing levels of stress, everyone just wants to do right by kids. In an online forum for teachers, one educator wrote, “I don’t blame the parents. They are usually super stressed out. [I’ve] had parents go from irate to crying in 20 minutes. As soon as I can identify the underlying fear and address that directly, we can get on the same page and come up with a plan.” All that to say—working together is possible.

Combat misinformation with positive relationships.

A good number of conflicts between school districts and families boil down to misinformation or a lack of information. Sometimes social media can be our worst enemy—especially when stakeholders start chiming in or sharing content without knowing all the facts.

Chris Mitchell is the manager of district communications and transportation for Granite City Community Unit School District #9 in Illinois. He says working at the crossroads of all things communication and transportation puts him in the position to “have difficult conversations with family members almost every day.” For Mitchell, the key to managing misinformation is to be as reachable and responsive as possible. “It’s frustrating when you have a complaint or a question, and you can’t get anybody to communicate with you,” Mitchell says. “Even if I can’t tell you what you want to hear, I can give you the consideration of calling you back.” 

Ashley Schutte of Indiana’s Madison Consolidated Schools (MCS) also has experience with difficult conversations with families—from both sides. More than 10 years ago, she was a district parent herself, struggling to understand some changes that were not communicated well. Schutte approached administration with suggestions on how they might improve communications and community relations. The district proceeded to offer her the role of communications coordinator—a position she has now held for 10 years. 

According to Schutte, MCS works to create relationships with families and community partners in order to create advocates for the district. These advocates can then help correct inaccurate information when they encounter it within their own social circles.

She also suggests getting proactive before misinformation has the chance to tarnish a family’s opinion about the district. “How often do parents get a phone call saying their kid rocked it at school that day?” she says. “Investing in the positive up front makes difficult conversations easier to have because our families are used to hearing from us.”

 Positive relationships are key to combating misinformation because they’re key to establishing trust. “The world we live in today is drowning in information,” Schutte says. “How can we find trusted sources? For our families, we hope to be that trusted source.”

Listen carefully and compassionately.

“Families just want to be heard,” Mitchell tells us. “A lot of times, they need someone to talk to, to vent to. They just need someone to listen.” Mitchell also tells us that in addition to effective listening skills, difficult conversations require solutions. “Tell them that you’re going to look into the problem,” he says, “that you’re going to try to find a way to fix it or to at least meet them in the middle.” 

In many cases, you aren’t the first person a frustrated parent has spoken with. Maybe that parent has already spoken with three other staff members before getting to you, in which case their worn patience has nothing to do with you personally. “There’s likely a lot that has happened prior to their interaction with me,” Schutte says, “and I always try and show grace in those conversations. If there’s something going on involving their child, who is the center of their world, we need to listen.” And Mitchell would agree. Even though school leaders are tasked with caring for hundreds if not thousands of students every day, when a frustrated parent calls, “the only student who matters in that phone call is the one you’re talking about,” he says.

As challenging as it can be sometimes, being a good listener is rooted in a set of learnable skills. Author and journalist Charles Duhigg explores this idea in his book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Duhigg blends research and storytelling to provide actionable and easy-to-understand strategies for mastering conversation—one of which has to do with becoming a top-tier listener. It’s called “looping for understanding.” 

Put simply, looping for understanding means asking questions, summarizing what you heard and then asking if you understood correctly. “In those moments [of conflict], everyone is skeptical and untrusting: Are they listening, or just preparing their rebuttal?” writes Duhigg. “To convince others we are genuinely listening during an argument, we must prove to them that we have heard them, prove we are working hard to understand, prove we want to see things from their perspective.” Looping for understanding cultivates climates of safety in even the most heated discussions—including across the dividing lines of America’s gun control debate. 

Duhigg writes about a group of civic-minded organizations that decided to host a discussion about guns in Washington D.C., inviting advocates from both sides of the issue. The goal was to see whether or not participants could listen to each other well enough to have a civil conversation. Before the discussion commenced, though, the event’s organizers taught participants a few specific communication skills—among them, looping for understanding.

According to Duhigg, participants “asked each other questions and summarized what they had heard, until everyone agreed they had gotten it all right.” One participant disclosed that one of her relatives had been assaulted in her home—so having a gun gave her peace of mind. Another participant talked about her daughters and shared her fears about school shootings. Despite having different viewpoints, both women’s beliefs were rooted in a well-founded fear of violence. 

The more participants looped for understanding, the better they understood each other. By the end of two days, the participants proved they were able to engage in a vulnerable conversation across vast ideological divides. According to Duhigg, the event was successful because “[participants] had learned how to show they were listening, ask honest questions, and become vulnerable enough to reveal feelings that, if they were lucky, led to finding common emotional ground.”

Regulation is key.

Regulating your own emotions during a time of heightened stress or conflict is much easier said than done. At MCS, students learn about emotional regulation in the classroom—whether that means recognizing when they’re hungry or asking for time to cool off when they’re frustrated. “We teach that from preschool on,” Schutte says, “but the reality is that often our adults aren’t regulated. There are bills, there’s work, there are all of these outside factors, and sometimes when we call to say a child is struggling at school—well, that could be a breaking point.” 

In those instances, as far as Schutte is concerned, practice makes perfect. “We trained our frontline people who are likely to have difficult interactions every day,” she tells us. “We talked about tone of voice and how they approach certain situations. Are you smiling when you talk? Do you think you’ve ever made a parent feel like they’re an inconvenience? We want to build awareness around the impact our personal demeanors can have and the fact that we all represent the entire district.”

Still yet, sometimes the best laid plans go awry. And they’re apt to go awry more often if school staff are themselves hanging by a thread. According to our 2024 research “A Seat at the Table,” an alarming 77% of school communicators said that they were at least “sometimes” burned out, with 37% answering that they were “always” or “often” burned out. While school leaders can’t necessarily tell parents to eat regular meals and take time to rest, they can manage their own emotional regulation and encourage those behaviors in their staff. 

For Mitchell, taking care of himself means taking time for himself. “I’m a big runner,” Mitchell says. “I like to take 30 minutes for myself to run at lunch or after work. Honestly, it changes my whole day.” Maybe your schedule can’t accommodate a run, but what would it look like to take 30 minutes every day to care for yourself?

Find common ground.

The vast majority of our conversations are social in nature. They focus on who we know in common, how we relate to each other and what we think about ourselves. The groups we consider ourselves to be a part of—from “sister” to “educator” to “Arkansan” and beyond—make up our social identities. And because our identities are so important, they can be a hotbed for potential conflict.

In recent years, you might have heard some conversation surrounding the safety of certain vaccines—and you’re probably already aware that folks on both sides of the debate are unlikely to budge. Asking someone to reconsider their opinion on this issue might feel tantamount to asking them to become a different person. That’s because, in some ways, that’s exactly what they feel they’re being asked to do.

Duhigg writes in Supercommunicators about Dr. Jay Rosenbloom, a pediatrician tasked with convincing families to vaccinate their children. As a new doctor, he initially struggled, frustrated that families weren’t swayed by his solid evidence that vaccinations were safe. But after decades of reflection, Rosenbloom realized that by challenging parents’ beliefs about vaccines, he was challenging their beliefs about themselves. 

What’s more, Rosenbloom was failing to show up in conversations with his patients as anything other than their doctor. “In a [social] conversation, we sometimes latch on to a signal identity: I am your parent or I am the teacher or I am the boss,” Duhigg writes. “In doing so, though, we hobble ourselves, because we start to see the world solely through that one lens.”

All humans contain multitudes, but we are not every version of ourselves in equal measure at every moment. Different moments require different social identities. If, for example, a parent walks into central office to contest their child’s suspension, at that moment your identity as a school leader is likely the most salient. But what if you were able to find common ground? What if you talked to that parent as a parent? In the case of Dr. Rosenbloom, Duhigg writes: “We forget that we are all complex and that, if we were thinking like parents instead of doctors, we might also ask skeptical questions about the drugs a stranger wants to inject into our kids. We might remember that asking questions is what good parents are supposed to do.” 

Like it or not, in education, difficult conversations have become par for the course. But, as Rosenbloom tells Duhigg, “You have to find some way to connect if you want people to hear what you’re saying.” Rosenbloom connected with concerned parents by knowing how it felt to be one. Similarly, the key to finding connection amidst difficult conversations at school is remembering that every frustrated party has one key focus in mind: students.

Not every difficult conversation will have a perfect resolution because it’s impossible to make everyone happy. But no matter how divisive the conversation, we can find common ground by remembering that we’re all doing our best to take care of kids. So, as Mitchell says: “Put your listening cap on the best you can, try to find a solution, be patient and remember why you do this job: because of the impact you can have on a child.”