Corter – valuing parents

Another example of an intangible desire that parents have is they want to feel supported by society for what they do. They feel under-valued for what they’re doing. Parents of new infants feel isolated. They often don’t have other parents to talk to about their daily existence as parents in the first year of life. There’s no place to come together to feel a sense of community and to get recognition for the important, hard work that they’re doing. And parents feel that the public, society in general, doesn’t really recognize the value of what they’re doing. And maybe that goes back to our society’s idea that parenting is really something you do in private. That it’s really the family’s job to do parenting, and then churn the child out into the public system of school or whatever.  

 But I think that view is faulty because in every country around the world, children are in services outside the home, they’re out in the community beyond the family even before they go to school. And we need to make sure that period is an optimal one: for parents as well as for children.  Another important intangible is that parents want to have a voice in to how society’s designed to help support their children. So they don’t just want to find what’s available in the community. They want to have a say in how services are arranged, and how they’re delivered. And I think we’re more and more recognizing the need to involve parents and listen to their voices in early childhood services. Not just in parenting programs but in child care, in kindergarten, in schools. And that’s an important recognition.