All parents should be required to volunteer time to their children's schools.

With parents being actively present at their children’s school surely there would be some undeniable advantages. However, requiring all the parents to put time for their children’s school is implausible as it entails several negative effects.

To begin with, parents who volunteer time to be at their children’s schools, give rise to some mutual benefits. First, they communicate with the other parents and they can take the advice of the other parents whose children are more successful. Furthermore, the school can be in touch with the parents and know better their children. For instance, a student might have recently gone through the parent’s divorce. By being aware of the trauma of the child, the faculty can treat that child more decently.

However, requiring an overdue time from the parents can have much more negative consequences. First, the parents may not have always enough time while they are in the need of working incessantly during the week. Many are those parents who work shifts in order to be able to meet the financial needs of their family. In this sense, it would be an extra burden on the parents to also be responsible for attending the school.

Secondly, when parents are present at school frequently, the independence of a child would be compromised. Schools are places that a child is getting prepared to live in the society which sooner or later there would be lesser or no protection of his/her family. As children sense their parents around them, they would be lulled into a false safety zone of dependence. Therefore, children need their own space to become as independent as they can, and the coming of parents to school may not lend such opportunity to the children.

Finally, schools should be equipped with child specialists to ask for the attendance of the parents in the public or private meetings only if there is a necessity, not requiring the parents to volunteer time. When children are in the hands of experts, any symptom would be better detected by the experts than parents. All the aggression, obsessive-compulsive, and depression symptoms may not be detected by the parents, but the specialists of children can inform the parents. With having experts in the schools, parents would get involved only when it is timely to do so. With this approach, there would be a win-win situation for students, their parents and their school.

In short, as discussed, there may be some positive points which having the parents in the school may have for the students. However, requiring all the parents to volunteer time for their child’s school is not tenable, for the potential negative consequences. The efficient approach would be when educational experts invite the parents to school when it is necessary.