Pao School’s Hongqiao Campus holds four Counselor Parent Coffee Mornings each academic year. These sessions share recent research in family education. Parents are invited to listen to professionals, discuss their own experiences, and build an emotional support network with other families.
The most recent Coffee Morning explored the theme of communicating with adolescents. Psychologists from Shanghai United Family Healthcare drew on neuroscience and clinical practice to explore typical adolescent behavior. They explained how behaviour such as refusing to communicate and pronounced mood swings often represent an adolescent’s attempt to balance a search for autonomy with a sense of belonging.
The session discussed practical steps that could help parents shift from losing control due to anxiety to building partnership with the adolescent. Parents were encouraged to listen for the emotions running beneath their child's words, to control their own responses, and to build a supportive network that includes the school and professional resources when needed.
In September, another Coffee Morning used drama to encourage communication between parents. Throughout the session, actors from the MindWeavers Theatre Company interpreted parent stories using Playback Theatre, an improvised form of drama in which actors interpret moments of vulnerability through movement, music, and spontaneous performance. The parents shared a range of emotions they had experienced as they navigated boundaries with their children, coped with mixed feelings when children left home for boarding school, balanced caregiving with self‑care, and rediscovered themselves through parenthood.
As one parent commented afterwards, watching the theatre’s recreation of each story proved more memorable than simply hearing accounts of such moments. Over the course of the morning, parents went from mere listeners to open participants, discovering how similar their emotional journeys had been, and finding both resonance and practical support in one another’s stories.
A healthy educational ecosystem depends on close cooperation between home and school. Pao School will continue to hold parent activities to build a stronger network for families and to support the healthy development of each student.
* Thanks to Tina Wu, Middle School Social Emotional Learning Coordinator and Counsellor and Victoria Xu, Counsellor, for their contribution to this article.
