When Parents Ask More, Are They Really the Problem?
The Dutch Education Council recently warned that the relationship between parents and schools is increasingly under pressure.
Teachers and school leaders report stress connected to interactions with parents. The number of disputes reaching national education dispute committees is increasing. In primary education, around one in three teachers reports work stress related to dealing with parents.
At first glance, it is easy to hear a familiar story in those findings.
Parents expect too much.
Parents interfere too much.
Parents no longer trust teachers.
Parents think they know better.
But perhaps there is another side of the story that deserves much more attention.
Parents have changed
There was a time when a teacher's opinion was rarely questioned.
The teacher was the professional. The parent listened.
That relationship has changed.
Parents today have access to research, specialists, assessments, support groups, books, lived-experience communities and information that previous generations simply did not have.
Many parents of children who need additional support spend years learning about their own child.
They attend appointments.
They read reports.
They watch patterns.
They try strategies.
They sit through assessments.
They see what happens before school, after school, during homework, at bedtime, during emotional overload and after a child has spent six hours holding themselves together.
That does not make the parent a teacher.
But neither does being a parent make their knowledge irrelevant.
And this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
Professional authority is not the same as knowing this child
Teachers have expertise in education.
Parents have expertise in their child.
Those two forms of knowledge should meet.
One should not automatically overrule the other.
The Dutch Education Council itself acknowledges that problems arise when it becomes unclear what families can reasonably expect from schools and what schools are able or required to provide. It warns that policy around additional support can position parents and schools as consumers and service providers facing one another instead of as people sharing responsibility for a child's development.
Parent organisations make another important point: tension should not simply be explained as parents having excessive expectations. Insufficient support, unclear rights and inadequate conditions can also create conflict.
That distinction matters.
Because when a parent keeps asking questions, we should not immediately ask:
Why is this parent so demanding?
Sometimes the better question is:
What is this parent seeing that we have not yet understood?
A child is not a protocol
This matters enormously for ADHD.
ADHD does not arrive in the classroom as a neat checklist.
One child talks constantly.
Another becomes invisible.
One cannot begin the worksheet.
Another finishes everything and falls apart at home.
One needs movement.
Another needs less sensory input.
One responds well to direct instruction.
Another experiences the same words as public humiliation.
The Nederlands Jeugdinstituut advises that approaches to ADHD cannot simply be applied universally. What works for one child may not work for another, and teachers and parents need to keep observing, experimenting and discussing what works for that particular child. It also stresses empathy and understanding that ADHD behaviours are not deliberate.
That is a very different mindset from:
We follow the procedure.
This is what children of this age should be able to do.
We already gave the accommodation.
The child needs to adapt.
Developmental expectations can be useful.
Protocols can be useful.
Growth curves can be useful.
But none of them is the child sitting in front of you.
A child should not have to fail badly enough before we decide they deserve help.
A child can be coping and still be struggling. They can improve in one area and still have a real difficulty in another. Support should not depend on a child deteriorating far enough to cross a threshold. The question should be what this child needs, not whether they have become “bad enough” to fit a protocol.
And teachers are being asked to do something incredibly complex
This is where I do not want the conversation to become teacher-bashing.
Teachers are asked to teach increasingly diverse classrooms while also responding to children with additional support needs.
The Education Inspectorate has examined the workload involved in providing that support, and teacher education itself varies considerably in how much attention is given to pedagogical competence and supporting children's social and emotional development.
That does not mean teachers do not care.
It does not mean teachers are incompetent.
It means we cannot assume that standing in front of a classroom automatically makes someone an expert in ADHD, emotional regulation, executive functioning, trauma, sensory needs, child psychology or every form of neurodivergence they may encounter.
And yet that adult may spend five or six hours every day with a child whose sense of themselves is still being built.
That deserves enormous care.
“The policy says...” cannot be the end of the conversation
Schools operate inside systems.
They have budgets.
Staff shortages.
Legal responsibilities.
Support frameworks.
Policies.
Limits.
Those things are real.
But they cannot become a place to hide from the human responsibility involved in educating children.
The Dutch government places a duty on schools to secure an appropriate educational place for pupils who need additional support.
A policy may explain what a school is able to provide.
It does not explain a child's entire experience.
A protocol may tell us what step comes next.
It does not tell us how a ten-year-old experiences the adult standing in front of them.
And “this is our procedure” should never mean:
Therefore we no longer need to be curious.
Parents are not asking teachers to surrender their expertise
Most parents I meet do not want to run the classroom.
They want the teacher to see their child.
They want curiosity before judgement.
They want questions before assumptions.
They want a teacher who can say:
“This isn't working. What are you seeing at home?”
And a parent who can say:
“This isn't working at home either. What are you seeing at school?”
That is partnership.
Not obedience.
Not consumer versus provider.
Not professional versus difficult parent.
Two adults holding different pieces of information about the same child.
Perhaps the loss of unquestioned authority is not the problem
Teachers may no longer automatically receive the unquestioned authority they once did.
I am not convinced that is necessarily a loss.
Authority that comes only from position is fragile.
Trust built from competence, curiosity, respect and the willingness to keep learning is far stronger.
A knowledgeable parent asking questions is not necessarily challenging the teacher's professionalism.
Sometimes they are doing exactly what the child alone can not do:
parents advocating for their child.
The answer cannot be to make parents quieter.
And it cannot be to make teachers responsible for everything either.
The answer has to include better training, clearer responsibilities, realistic resources, genuine parental participation and a willingness on both sides to treat the child as an individual rather than a case to be processed.
The Education Council itself recommends strengthening parents' collective role within school communities rather than reducing their involvement.
That is worth noticing.
The relationship is not the whole system
From a parent perspective, there is another risk in this conversation: that “the relationship between parents and schools” becomes the place where a much bigger system problem is deposited.
The Education Council itself warns against reducing the issue to individual behaviour. Its advice explicitly asks the government to look at how laws, regulations and policy shape the relationship between parents and schools.
That broader lens matters.
The Netherlands has an acknowledged shortage of teachers and school leaders. The government is actively trying to increase recruitment and speed up routes into teaching, including pathways for people entering education from other careers. That may be necessary in a shortage, but it also makes questions about preparation, support and professional development even more important.
Teacher education is not identical across programmes, and recent inspection work has shown variation in how pedagogical competence is addressed. So when a child needs more than subject instruction, it is reasonable for the wider policy conversation to ask not only whether parents and teachers communicate well, but also whether professionals have enough time, training and specialist support to understand the children in front of them.
The same applies to systems built around norms, benchmarks, protocols and expected developmental trajectories.
Those structures can help schools organise support. But they can also become too blunt if they are treated as the child rather than as one source of information about the child.
A fuller policy discussion therefore includes difficult questions:
Are staffing levels giving teachers enough capacity to respond to individual children?
Are teachers being prepared and supported well enough in areas such as ADHD, executive functioning, emotional regulation, child development and neurodiversity?
Are protocols and developmental benchmarks being used as guides, or as boxes children are expected to fit into?
How much flexibility does the education system allow when a conventional school setting is not working for a particular child?
What role can carefully regulated alternatives, including digital or more flexible forms of education, play for children who cannot consistently access ordinary schooling?
In the Netherlands, home education is not a general alternative available simply because a family prefers it, and compulsory-schooling rules allow exemptions only in defined circumstances. Digital distance education is recognised as a possible part of support when a child temporarily cannot attend school fully because of physical or psychological reasons. Those limits are important context when discussing “choice”: the current system does not offer families an unrestricted menu of schooling models.
So the question is bigger than whether parents and teachers should communicate better.
It is also about what conditions the system creates for both of them.
If a teacher has too little time, too little specialist preparation or too few support resources, goodwill alone cannot solve that.
If a parent is repeatedly told that a child falls outside a norm, while the available system offers little room to respond differently, better communication alone cannot solve that either.
That does not make schools the enemy. It does not make parents automatically right.
It means the relationship between them cannot be examined in isolation from the system surrounding them.
Because this is the part we cannot lose
Behind every dispute, policy, support plan, meeting and email is a child.
A child who notices whether adults believe them.
A child who notices when they are repeatedly corrected but rarely understood.
A child who learns, slowly, what their difficulties supposedly say about who they are.
Teachers hold those developing identities in their hands for hours every day.
Parents hold them for the rest.
Neither side should be trying to win.
Our children deserve adults who remain curious enough to learn from one another.
They deserve schools where difference is not treated as failure to follow the standard path.
They deserve parents who are allowed to ask questions.
They deserve teachers who are supported and expected to keep learning.
And above all, they deserve to be known as the individual human beings they are.
Give our children the future they deserve.
Sources and further reading
Dutch Education Council (Onderwijsraad), Advisory report on the relationship between parents and schools, 10 September 2026
Dutch Education Council (Onderwijsraad), summary: Heb meer oog voor gevolgen wet- en regelgeving voor relatie tussen ouders en scholen
Ouders & Onderwijs, response to the Education Council advice
Nederlands Jeugdinstituut (NJi), ADHD: Samenwerken met school
Dutch Inspectorate of Education, research on primary-teacher education, 9 September 2025
Dutch Inspectorate of Education, full report on curricula leading to primary teaching
Rijksoverheid, responsibility of schools in passend onderwijs
Rijksoverheid, approach to teacher shortages
Rijksoverheid, digital distance education when a child temporarily cannot attend school
Rijksoverheid, compulsory education and exemptions
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