Family Involvement in Preschool

 

What Research Tells Us

There is currently universal consensus that family engagement promotes successful school experiences and positive learning outcomes. Evidence shows that there is a strong positive link between family involvement and student learning and achievement. Not only does it foster the cognitive development in children, but it also positively impacts the emotional growth and social behavior. It has been also been well-documented that family involvement contributes to higher academic achievement, stronger motivation towards school, and a greater value for education that engenders higher education. Over the last forty years, parental engagement has been receiving increasing attention worldwide, and a growing emphasis on the spread of parental involvement practices started to prevail. Hence, bridging the gap that frequently occurs between home and school has been gaining a growing attention. It allows for building successful partnerships between educators and families as they become more dynamically involved, especially early on.

Despite of the above, some parents are still reluctant to actively engage in their children’s learning at the preschool level. Instead of embarking upon involvement from the early beginning, families tend to delay engagement until their children are older and need a more tangible academic support unless developmental problems that require them to immediately intervene surface before that. Unfortunately, there remains a considerable lack of understanding of key issues pertaining to family involvement as well as oblivion of the impact parents are able to make on their children’s learning at a very early stage. This limited understanding often leads families to become confused about the effective parental roles they actually need to play with their pre-schoolers.

What Can We Do?

To be effective, everyone needs to understand that parents must be involved in much more than helping children achieve their academic goals. In reality, families can benefit from meaningful opportunities to provide a sustained commitment through which they can influence many aspects of their children’s attitude towards learning. Asking the children about their day, sharing news with the teacher about their children, discovering their strengths, interests and areas for improvement, getting to know the children’s school friends, demonstrating a positive attitude about education, encouraging the children to read and reading to them, encouraging the children to be responsible and work independently, etc…

Conclusion

The preschool years present a great opportunity to lay the basic foundations for children’s future success by providing positive learning experiences. As families are key partners in this overall process, they need to be purposefully acknowledged, intentionally empowered, and actively engaged. When solid partnership between home and school is built, we can reach our shared goals and reach a balanced collaboration that will create a healthy learning environment and constructively influence change and solve emerging problems.