Our kids take in a lot of messages every day about their families, unique stories, and needs and experiences. It’s easy for parents and caregivers to worry about the impacts those messages have on our adopted, foster, or relative children. The worry can spike around this time of year, especially if your kids are starting a new school year with a teacher unfamiliar to your family or if your student is starting in a new building or school district. Writing a letter to your student’s teacher can help set the teacher and your child up for a successful transition to the new school year.

Why Write a Dear Teacher Letter?

Raising a child impacted by adoption, foster care, or kinship care requires additional layers of advocating for our kids than what our peers may need. As common as adoption, foster care, and raising a relative child may be, it’s still less commonly understood by many. Schools are doing a great job of catching up to what we parents and caregivers already know about trauma, loss, prenatal substance exposure, and other related factors that impact our kids. However, it’s not uncommon to encounter an educator unaware of these impacts on learning and the classroom experience. Your advocacy via this letter can invite a partnership between home and school, start the school year on a positive note, and equip the teacher with resources that will help your child experience success.

Seek a Partnership

Many teachers request some introduction from parents and caregivers within the first few weeks of school. This introduction can be a form letter they send home or an outline they ask you to flesh out and return. It is their invitation to partnership and leans on your understanding of your child’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses. This teacher-driven tool can be a great start to a successful collaboration. You should feel free to add to the introduction if it doesn’t cover all you want the teacher to know.

Building that bridge between home and school is an excellent way to partner early and show yourself as collaborative, especially when you know you’ll likely need that goodwill and bridge-building as the school year progresses. In the higher levels of middle and high school, the teachers contact parents or caregivers less frequently for introductions. In many cases, you may need to be the one to initiate an invitation to partnership.

Set a Positive Foundation.

Another reason to write a letter to your child’s teacher is that you can lay the foundation early. You get to set the tone for the positive, normalized language your family prefers for your child’s story. Early touchpoints offer the opportunity to set the stage for how you choose to address some of the additional issues you know you must consider in this child’s classroom experiences.

For example, you know that your child’s trauma history creates some challenging behaviors when your child feels unsafe. You can offer preemptive information about what soothes your child and what triggers their “fight, flight, or freeze” response. You can positively impact the teacher’s understanding of how you guard your child’s story by telling them who knows this type of information and why you’ve chosen to share it now.

Offer to Be a Resource.

Finally, you likely have taken advantage of many tools and resources that help you implement a trauma-informed approach to raising this child. You are reading here, so we can assume that you are interested in learning and building your skills. Writing a “Dear Teacher” letter allows you to share the resources you’ve found most effective in supporting your student. You can also set a collaborative tone so the teachers know you are willing to see other practical tools so they can experience your child’s ability to succeed. Your child’s classroom experience will benefit, but the bonus is that you can also expand the school’s ability to serve the needs of many other children who bring complex contexts to the classroom.

Parent’s Guide to Working with the Schools on Behavior

The “Dear Teacher” Letter

We’ve created a template for parents and caregivers to meet the unique circumstances their child brings to this year’s classroom. We’ve included the key points to help you communicate your desire for partnership and the positive culture your family has crafted around this child. You can read it, consider what you wish to add or change and create your version. Depending on several factors, like other children from your family who attended this school, a previous experience with this year’s teacher, or specific needs and recent challenges your child faces, update the letter yearly without starting from scratch at the end of every summer.

The audience for this template is elementary-level teachers. As your child progresses to the upper grades, check with other parents in your community about the tone or culture in grades your family has yet to experience. The elements of the letter that are in parentheses () are great points to personalize to fit your family’s dynamic.

Here is the Template.

Dear Teacher,

Our son, Johnny, is excited about this school year, and so are we. I wanted to share some information about him to help you get to know him better.

Johnny joined our family at (age), and we have (limited information on his early life, are in an open adoption with his birth family, have been fostering him for X years, etc.).

You are in a significant position to send a message about (adoption, foster care, grandparents raising grandkids, etc.) to the other children and families in this class.

We hope the students hear positive messages about the many different types of families and how kids join those families, such as:

  • Some children are born to their parents.
  • Sometimes, children are adopted by their parents.
  • Other times, children live with safe adults (grandparents, aunts, foster parents) while their adults get back on their feet after grown-up challenges.
  • Regardless of how families come about, they are all “normal” and good.

I want to make your job around these conversations easier by sharing examples of the appropriate responses to common questions children may ask about families like ours. Most of these are questions our family has already heard, and we practice answers that feel most comfortable to Johnny.

  1. Who are Johnny’s “real” parents? Johnny has two sets of parents: the parents who gave birth to him and the parents who will raise him and be his mom and dad forever. Those are Mrs. and Mr. Smith, whom you know.
  2. Why doesn’t Johnny live with his birth (first) parents? When he was born, Johnny’s first parents could not parent him (raise him, be his parents, whichever fits your classroom’s understanding levels). Johnny needed a safe, loving place to grow up (his grandparents to care for him, etc.).
  3. Why doesn’t Johnny look like his mommy (or daddy or brother, etc.)? Children usually look like the parents that gave birth to them, don’t they? Johnny looks like his birth parents (his grandfather, etc.).

You may already understand this, but some school assignments may be challenging for Johnny. I’m not asking that you change the learning objectives of those projects. I would appreciate an advanced warning when those assignments come up. We also need flexibility to adapt the assignment to fit our family’s circumstances. Here are a few examples of the type of school assignments that might be challenging for him:

  • creating a family tree
  • bringing in baby pictures
  • sharing birth or young infancy stories
  • discussions of inherited traits

Johnny is (bright, funny, curious, determined, etc.) and will be an excellent addition to your classroom culture. I welcome an opportunity to meet with you or talk further by phone after you have a chance to get to know my wonderful boy. Let’s schedule a time to talk in about three weeks.

Should you feel it could be helpful, I would be open to coming to the classroom to read books about (adoption, foster care, or kinship families) to the class (or provide some books about adoption, foster care, and relative caregiving for your personal use or the school library). Our family has quite a collection that we read together. Children’s books can be excellent conversation starters to help the kids grasp the stories of families like ours.

Our family is excited about working together to make this a great year for Johnny. Thank you so much for being on our team.

Best wishes,

Johnny’s Loving Parents

What Else Should Be In The Letter?

Depending on your child’s unique life experiences or specific needs and challenges, you can present information that further fleshes out your child’s context. For example, if your child has some challenging behaviors commonly part of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), consider sharing your child’s diagnosis. If sharing medical diagnoses or other private information in a letter feels uncomfortable, pursue that in-person meeting you mentioned in your Dear Teacher letter and share it then.

Additional Information That Might Be Helpful

Here are examples of other information parents and caregivers share in these letters. Remember to always start with the positive traits your child possesses so the teachers gain an understanding of their strengths. Again, the parentheses () give you space to personalize your child’s needs and solutions.

If your child struggles with stress and anxiety:

Johnny is enthusiastic about everything and loves school. He tries so hard to please – especially the adults in his life.

Due to some challenging early life experiences (prenatal substance exposure or loss, etc.), he tends to shoulder a lot of stress. You may see him (name the behavior) when his stress levels escalate. Johnny usually responds well when you (remind him to take ten deep breaths, give him a fidget toy, offer him a cold drink, etc.).

If your child struggles with personal space.

Johnny is very loving and always happy to be with his friends. In his excitement, he might forget other people’s boundaries, and you may see him (hugging, touching, sitting too close, etc.) He usually responds well when you remind him of (his personal bubble, his friend’s safe zones, etc.).

If your child has developmental gaps (or language delays) that make learning hard.

We are so proud of how hard Johnny has worked to learn English since it is not his first language. Reading out loud (or writing or answering aloud in class) can be more challenging for him than his peers. He responds well when he has time to think (has advance notice for classroom discussion, can write notes for himself, etc.) You can also refer to his (IEP, 504, etc.) for ideas to further support him.

If your child doesn’t have a learning support plan in place.

Johnny does (does not) have an IEP (yet). We are learning about what resources would be best to support him. In the meantime, we found that the following strategies work well to help him learn (refer them to the IEP document or list the strategies you know are most beneficial, such as chunking material, reading aloud to him, etc.).

Maintain Open Communication Between Home and School

After you send this letter at the start of the school year, maintain open communication with the teacher, especially if changing circumstances or challenges crop up at home. Remind them that you are willing to be a resource or research additional resources that will benefit your child’s experience in the classroom and build a positive message about Johnny and his family. Some teachers are open to podcasts, webinars, or training events that address the educational issues foster, kinship, or adopted children commonly face. When you learn something new, please offer to share it with the teaching team.

Be your child’s biggest cheerleader to the teacher. Encourage every effort this teacher makes to understand your child better. Assure them that you are all in for helping them build a safe, trusting relationship that brings out the best in your child.

Parenting a Child Exposed to Trauma – a Free Guide!

Send the Message That Your Child is Precious!

Writing a Dear Teacher letter requires an additional layer of intentionality on your shoulders – particularly if you’ve never written one before. Hopefully, our template will lighten that load a bit. We trust that you will find the activity a worthy method of advocating for your adopted, foster, or kinship child. We are confident that these efforts will speak volumes about your belief in and commitment to your child’s preciousness — to the teacher and your child.

Image Credits: Peter Olexa; CDC; Karolina Kaboompics