Meaningful family engagement in children?s early learning supports school readiness and later academic success. Parental involvement is a critical element of high-quality early care and education. It has been mandated by the Head Start framework since Head Start?s inception in 1964, built into model programs like Abecedarian, outlined in Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), and incorporated into NAEYC standards for programs serving young children (Snow, N.D.).
The primary theoretical basis for collaboration between schools, family and community is the Ecological Systems Model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979,1992; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998), given its acknowledgement of the shared systems of all the stakeholders and the dynamic nature of the
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The majority of the parents also believed that they had the time and energy to help with homework, but fewer said they knew enough about the subject content of homework assigned by school teacher, to be helpful enough to clear the doubts for their children at that very moment when they have …show more content…
This may require special efforts to keep in touch with parents, such as an evening phone call, home visits, parent-teacher dialogue journals, arrangement of?transportation and child care, or events scheduled on Saturdays (Barbour, 2012).
There are also not many opportunities for the parents to be involved in school activities throughout the year. Part of the reason for lack of parental involvement in school activities would be the timing of such activities where parents finds it difficult to absent themselves from work. Plans could be made at the end of the year for such school activities for the whole of next year to be given to the parents so that they can plan their work in advance and join in the activities.
As quoted by OECD (N.D.) the overall findings from parenting programmes indicate that: parents feel more secure in interactions with their children, boost their sense of well-being and benefit their children (Diamond and Hyde, 2000; Scott, 2003; Sylva et al., 2004); parents increase self-confidence in good parenting, particularly for poor families (Epstein,