Parent Involvement

Required, high-frequency parent involvement is one thing that sets us apart from other early childhood programs for disadvantaged children. Please read this post from Head Start’s daily e-letter.

FROM EXCHANGE EVERYDAY

Effective Parent Involvement
September 18, 2014

“Around the world, parents have dramatic influence on how their children learn.  But Parent Teacher Association meetings are not where learning happens.”  This is the observation of Amanda Ripley in her book, The Smartest Children in the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013) in which she explores why students from Korea, Finland and Poland do so much better than US students in math. She continues…

“Research shows that parents who are most active in their children’s schools do not tend to raise smarter children.  The real impact happens mostly at home.  Parents who view themselves as educational coaches tend to read to their children every day when they are small; when their children get older, they talk with them about their days and about news around the world.  They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work.  They teach them good habits and give them autonomy.  They are teachers, too, in other words, and they believe in rigor. They want their children to fail while they are still children.  They know that those lessons – about hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences – will serve a child for decades to come.”

They talk about it, we do it!