Parent Programs in Pre-K through Third Grade

Abstract

Summary Parents strongly influence their children's development, and prekindergarten and early elementary programs--especially those serving children at risk for low achievement because of their family backgrounds--often feature programming to support parents' role in their children's learning. Despite the prevalence of such programs, however, we have little good evidence of their effectiveness. In this article, Katherine Magnuson and Holly Schindler review more promising, fully developed parent programs. In their daily work, preschool and elementary school programs and teachers commonly use a variety of formal and informal activities to support, educate, and involve parents, such as having parents volunteer in the classroom or encouraging children to share classwork or other materials with their parents. Though such practices are widespread, the authors write, we have little rigorous evidence to show that they're associated with children's academic success. Add-on parenting programs, in contrast, generally target a particular subset of parents, and they often have a highly specific and clearly developed programmatic approach. Such programs focus on helping parents improve either their children's early academic skills or their behavior and self-regulation. Among the types of parent support that Magnuson and Schindler review, add-on programs have shown the most promise to improve children's learning. But parents with many demands on their time may find it hard to sustain a commitment to these programs; technological solutions such as communication by text messaging may be one way to solve this problem. A final way to involve parents is to give them information about the quality of their prekindergarten or elementary school choices, although such information may not be particularly useful to parents who live near a set of similarly high-performing or low-performing schools, or can't access programs because of limited enrollments or cost. ********** Because young children spend so much of their time in their parents' care, parents are often described as children's first teachers. Parents' verbal interactions, responsiveness, and stimulation all help to develop their children's early skills and to prepare them to learn in formal settings. However, parents differ in the quantity and quality of their interactions with their children and the degree to which they provide enriching experiences, both of which are important in understanding socioeconomic gaps in children's academic achievement. (1) Thus early learning and educational settings--especially those serving children at risk for low achievement because of their family backgrounds--often feature programming to support parents' role in their children's learning. Despite the prevalence of parent-related services, practices, and programmatic components in early learning and elementary school, we have little good evidence of their effectiveness. In this review, we discuss why preschools and elementary schools often target parents in their efforts to improve students' learning, and we critically review evaluations of several types of parenting programs for parents of prekindergarten through third-grade children. However, we don't examine more general efforts to involve parents in school activities, school decision-making, and leadership, and to build school-family partnerships. Why Target Parents? Parenting behaviors that are consistently warm, responsive, and cognitively stimulating promote children's cognitive and behavioral development, providing a strong foundation for learning in schools. (2) Volumes of research link children's experiences with their caregivers--and in their home environments more generally--to their early language, literacy, math, social, and behavioral development. However, because many other factors might explain these associations, it's hard to claim that the links between the quality of parent-child interactions and children's early skills and behavior constitute a causal chain. …