Can Teachers and Parents Get Better at Talking to One Another?

It was a weekday afternoon in the spring when my son’s kindergarten teacher got in touch about the ghost teen. During a social-studies unit about families, the teacher reported, my son had regaled his classmates with tales of his eighteen-year-old brother, who picks him up every afternoon at dismissal.

I laughed out loud when I received this note, which was sent via ClassDojo, the messaging app used by our public elementary school in Brooklyn. My son has no brother of any age, and yet I could picture this brother immediately—I imagined him, for some reason, as one of the seniors from “Dazed and Confused,” leaning against his scuzzy, old Pontiac parked just outside the school gate, a Marlboro Red hanging from his lips, Foghat wafting from the tape deck.

But the teacher did not seem amused. She asked me to talk to my kid about the importance of “being honest,” and to “review with him who is in his family.”

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