Aware parents. Weaving relationships between families and childhood services

Abstract

Prato is a city with widespread social and cultural wealth, a city which has always made up of communities and cultures, with a tradition of active participation of the local authority in educational events for people in all stages of life, to offer a wide range of training opportunities; Prato has a strong tradition of solidarity, a vibrant civil society, several cultural, social and leisure associations. Prato is getting less homogeneous, both in terms of economic wealth that the presence and composition of families and activities: there are backgrounds and different cultural, linguistic and social appearances, making it a complex city; more, the population increases in the children range, due to immigration, and the crisis in the textile manufacturing has led to the impoverishment of families. The effort to which families are called in an attempt to arrange the working times with the child care can lead to experience isolation and stress, decreasing range of relationships, poor opportunities to share experiences of parents and children. To a complex reality we must fit a model of services articulated and able to put in evidence relationships and connections among experiences, skills, different individual and collective subjects to answer to the diversified needs. There are some milestones for the work of the City of Prato to state its responsibilities and its role as a public institution: ensuring that families have access to educational opportunities for • their children from the age of three months onwards;