Packing lunches, clipping finger nails and dropping children home – these are just a few of the things demanding parents in Japan have asked teachers to do!
By the end of the month, Japanese teachers will be receiving a manual to help them cope with pushy parents. The move is part of a 10 million yen (£74,000) plan to curtail the influence of demanding parents, reports the Telegraph.
More than 60,000 teachers and workers in Toyko’s public school will get the handbook. Government stats show teachers who are absent because of mental stress make up 63% of the sick leave taken.
The rise in ridiculous parental demands has been connected to what some experts are calling the “commercialisation” of the education system. Over the past 10 years, parents have been able to choose where their child goes to school. This has seen schools competing, and parents acting like customers in a department store, according to one academic who has studied “monster parents” in Japan, Naoki Ogi.
The manual is said to offer teachers practical tips on dealing with parents and complaints. A complaint management advisor who oversaw the handbook, Shinichi Sekine, explained the publication would help the teachers "act appropriately if they have examples of incidents and their possible solutions in mind beforehand."
Parents behaving badly – the Japanese media have cited these examples:
- Washing gym clothes
- Clipping nails
- Checking weather forecasts to see if umbrellas are required
- Preparing lunch boxes for school trips
- Reprinting school yearbooks with more photos of their children
- Dropping children back home after school
