Research on Family Involvement in Early Childhood Education

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New Thinking about Family Involvement

How many of you remember your parents going to conferences or to Open House nights? How many of you remember your parent serving as a driver or chaperone for field trips or other events? Those are fairly common experiences. As you will read in the next part of this chapter, educators now think much more holistically about family involvement. There's compelling information from research about the importance of that involvement, and there are both state and national policies recognizing and recommending that involvement.

When families are involved, there is a communication to children about the value of their families. Sometimes, that value may not be what is intended. When Keeley's mom, Kerry, assists in the computer lab at her school, Keeley may think that the school believes that her mom is smart and that Keeley's teacher appreciates her mom. However, if Keeley only observes her teacher communicating with her mom to talk about Keeley's problems in class, there is another message. If the only request for help is to bake a cake for the school fair, there is yet another message.

All children want to feel pride in their families, and that pride will probably influence how the child feels about herself. Extensive research, much of it very current, shows that families are critical to children's success. We think that the findings of some of those studies are an important foundation to your philosophy about family involvement and to your decisions about the role families will play in your future work.

Research on Family Involvement

Significant research over at least 25 years has demonstrated that "family involvement is critical to the educational success of children" (Kniepkamp, 2005, p. 16). To elaborate on that finding is an additional conclusion from the research: "When schools acknowledge the relevance of children's homes and cultures and promote family involvement, they can develop a supportive environment for learning through meaningful activities that engage and empower families" (Ramey & Ramey, 1999; Rhodes, Enz, & LaCount, 2006). As our schools and programs become more diverse, that relevance of home and culture takes on greater importance and expands teachers' responsibilities for collaboration with families. Before we describe some approaches for developing partnerships and collaborations, we'll look at the benefits of children, families, schools and communities.

Benefits for Children as Students. "When schools and families work together, children have a much better chance for success, not just in school, but throughout life" (Henderson & Berla, 1996, p. 1). The benefits for children may look like they are too broad for your thinking about young children because they generalize across a wide age span (ECE to high school). But if you keep in mind that the patterns for success begin in early childhood, then the benefits have much relevance for work with young children. Those benefits of family involvement include: