School-age kids go through developmental and emotional changes that make parenting more difficult. Therefore, parenting classes are often offered that help parents discipline their kids and also improve parent-child relationships. These classes provide parents with strategies that have been found to work with school-age children. Parents can ask questions about issues they are dealing with regarding their children, and both the instructor and parents can provide feedback on specific issues. Also, parents can receive emotional support for issues they're dealing with regarding their children. Some parenting classes are set up like traditional classes, with each class session covering material in a way that forms a comprehensive whole. Others have workshop formats where parents learn how to deal with specific issues, such as teenage promiscuity.
Like most subjects, parents must understand the foundational ideas behind parenting before they can understand what they can do as parents. Classes often cover concepts of child and adolescent development. Courses cover specific tools that parents can use to work with their kids, such as disciplinary measures. Classes also try to reshape parental attitudes towards children. Parents have varying attitudes towards how much children should be protected and how much autonomy children should receive. Parents do not only learn to manage their children, but also to develop healthy and positive relationships with them.
The issues that parents run into with grade school children include communication issues, since children often do not have the vocabulary and abstract thinking skills to understand everything that their parents say. Children often have emotions and ideas that they cannot articulate. Parents also sometimes struggle to get children to cooperate.
As children reach adolescence, they often become rebellious and sometimes engage in risky behavior such as substance abuse and promiscuity. Teenagers tend to distance themselves from their parents and often adopt youth culture, which is at odds with values that parents represent. Teenagers have better communication skills than children, but are often not communicative or respectful towards their parents.
Some parents engage in unacceptable parenting strategies, such as abuse and neglect. These activities can often be predicted based on the situation that the family is in. For example, families that are in poverty or that have poor housing situations often have high degrees of abuse and neglect.