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Every Parent is a Perfect Learning Coach!
part one
By Linda Dobson
Today’s life and career coaches don’t need to know every sordid detail of your past to help you achieve your goals and dreams today. Likewise, a learning coach needn’t know the depths of educational theory or the latest classroom management techniques to become a loving, guiding partner throughout your child’s quest toward goals and dreams, either.
Back in the 1700s, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: “The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind; they will both fall into the ditch. The only sure guide is he who has often gone the road which you want to go. Let me be that guide, who has gone all roads, and who can consequently point out to you the best.”
There are many compelling reasons that the Earl’s advice to his son makes sense, and it helps explain why no one is better suited as learning coach than a caring parent.
• It’s Only Natural

No one knows your child better than you, the one who watched his personality take shape right before your eyes.
Since the advent of compulsory schooling about 150 years ago, it has become customary to spend a minimum of thirteen years focusing on children’s intellects as they grow. Thanks to this educational approach, during the same period our society slowly but steadily created a proliferation of studied “experts” in every realm possible, including the professionalization of teaching. Placing full confidence in school personnel’s expertise, some parents’ natural instincts related to child-rearing have atrophied with disuse. When an instinctual “feeling” does strike, we’re so used to the focus on intellect that we’ve grown very good at thinking feelings away.
But consider for a moment who shows baby tigers how to hunt, or little ducklings how to get around the pond. It’s a parent, of course! There is nothing more natural and valuable than parental guidance when it comes to helping a human child learn, too.
If you feel your parental instinctive skills could stand a little exercise, not to worry. While using many of the learning coach techniques in this book you’ll hone your instincts at the same time, in no time.
• No One Knows Your Child Better
While retaining the same teacher for several years in elementary grades is an on-going education fad in some sections of the country, more often a teacher charged with educating your child gets to know him – and usually a minimum of twenty or so other children – for ten months. The teacher may take time to review your child’s file filled with previous test scores and former teachers’ comments in a file, or even learn a thing or two through the more informal grapevine of the teachers’ lounge. But that’s it.
No one knows your child better than you, the one who watched his personality take shape right before your eyes. You’re the one who knows what interests, inspires, and intrigues. You’re also the one who knows what aggravates, agitates, and alienates. This information alone lets you help your child better than any Master’s degree or textbook or standardized test ever would.
Stay tuned for part two tomorrow with more on why you as parent are a perfect learning coach!