Who is to blame for a child’s poor academic performance?

Who takes responsibility for a child’s academic success, is it the parent or child himself or even the teacher?

The parents are mainly responsible for a child’s academic performance but note that other factors are also involved.

“Parents should be blamed although it is quite acceptable that other parties contribute to what becomes of a child who was given birth to without any knowledge of good or bad but become influenced by environment he/she grows up in. The child’s parents are in a better position to instruct and mold the behaviour of th

e child even before the child is sent to any formal learning environment.

The Teacher is not to blame because there is a little they can offer

to a child whose parents fail to carry out their principal responsibilities of making sure they do the needful.
The view that modern-day parents do not encourage their children to earn success, but would rather support them to pass exams by all means is an anomaly regardless of how commonplace it is. 
The teachers also used to be children and had parents; the older the teachers grow up to become, is a function of the character of the parents that raised them. Teachers cannot monitor the pupils while watching TV at home when they are supposed to be studying. 
Bingham University student, Esther Joshua Bamayi, says the child takes responsibility for his/her success or failure. “If a student is really determined to work hard, he will try all the possible ways to do that not minding if the teacher doesn’t do his work or the parents don’t do theirs,” Bamayi states. 


“A teacher can only teach his syllabus but it is left for the student to go and read wider on his own. We have great people in our nation that lost their parents at a tender age but still made it in their academics.


As this issue continue to generate opposing views, some people believe that teachers and parents are jointly to blame because they both have roles to play, though the “teachers carry most of the blame.” They attribute this to factors like training, remuneration, motivation and teaching environment.

A mother places the blame on all three parties pointing out that parents are supposed to always check the children’s progress but they do not, because they are too busy with their own lives: “Once they do that they will always know whether the child is doing well or not. But when parents do not check on their kids, even when the child is not performing, how will they know?”
She adds that teachers share the blame because the way they handle students can also affect their performance: “Fear can sometimes prevent a child from performing well. Being strict leads to fear hence when a teacher is too harsh and strict, it can affect the child’s performance.”

A teacher at Port Harcourt says both students and parents are to blame because “the students are not prepared to learn. You’ll see them during exam periods playing all over the place instead of reading their books. Some of them skip classes, and they don’t even do their assignments when they are given, they wait for those who have done it then they copy. And this is very wrong.”


She added that parents contribute to their children’s failure in school because they do not bother to check their books, stressing that: “They don’t assist them with their assignments. Some don’t even know the class their children belong to, and this is very bad.” 
Blaming parents further, the worried teacher notes that: “All they are after is their business. They go out in the morning for their businesses, sometimes come back very late.”