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Engaging Families

by María Fernanda Levis-Peralta
September/October 2014
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Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/engaging-families/5021980/

Children are born and raised in social and economic contexts that have a lasting impact on their lives. Where a child is born, her race, family income, and socio-economic status play important roles in defining the circumstances of her future. Within this context, decades of research demonstrate that parental involvement and family engagement influence children’s lives more than any other identified factor. Researchers have even found that “parenting is more important than schools to academic achievement.”1 However, many programs are not fully leveraging the power of engaging families in their work.

Family engagement has been at the core of many important early childhood development programs prompting outstanding results. Yet as all practitioners know, the theory is much neater than the practice. Barriers to involving ­parents in programs include parent and teacher time, negative attitudes, preconceptions, demographics, employment ­status, cultural backgrounds, and ­uncertainty about what to do.2, 3

At the 2014 World Forum on Early Care and Education we were able to discuss these issues with scores of practitioners and identified both a growing interest in family engagement and a proliferation of initiatives to reach parents across the globe. The wealth of information provided was extraordinary, and in no way possible to summarize in ...

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