Corter – respect parents

Parents also play a critical role in everything, naturally, and so their role in interacting with infants, with toddlers, and preschoolers, is going to be very important to building these kinds of skills as well. 

The question about how to engage parents in early childhood programs and in primary schools is a burning question. If you look at the practice and policy literature, you’ll see there’s the constant question of how do we bring parents into our programs, whether they’re childcare, whether they’re school programs, and I think there’s been some misunderstanding in terms of there being sort of one way to do that or a set of ways that are going to fit all parents. I think all parents are different. Different groups of parents look different from each other, but within different groups of parents there’s so much variability in their attitudes, what they’re looking for, but every parent wants what’s best for her or his child. So we can start with that and we think that professionals want that too as a common starting ground. But I think to truly engage parents, you have to recognize and respect the importance of what they’re doing, and it may not be the visible forms of parent engagement where the parent comes to the childcare and chat up the early childhood educator as she drops off her child or as he picks up his child, or the parent who comes to school and volunteers or serves on school council. Those are visible forms and that’s what we’ve always said well we’ve got to get more parents out to those school council, PTA type meetings, but in fact the most powerful things that parents are doing are probably at home, or are at home, and even with respect with what’s going on in the childcare or what’s going on in the school, the parents help prepare the child to be successful in that. 

There’s so much parents are contributing. So I think one way to engage parents is to acknowledge that, and let parents know that’s critically important to that partnership that should be formed between the program and the home. So that would be the number one principle: respect parenting.