Parent Engagement Can Close School Readiness Gap: New Research Review

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJ) just released an exciting research review.  Decades of research prove that children begin learning from the first day of their lives. Thus, parents are the prime drivers of early development, which lays the foundation for lifelong learning.  As we’ve argued in previous blogs (1, 2, 3, 4), it stands to reason that supporting parents to nurture their children’s early experiences will enhance children’s readiness for school and social skills, decrease children’s behavior problems, and strengthen academic success.  A new research report from RWJ asks “What Works” under the umbrella of parent engagement.  As you can see from the report title,Parent Engagement Practices Improve Outcomes for Preschool Children, it focuses on the ultimate goal of improving children’s outcomes.

This research brief highlights recent parent engagement studies conducted with families living in low-income homes or communities with preschool children ages 3-5 years considered at risk for poor school readiness.  It reviews the benefits and challenges of systematically engaging families in early childhood programs in order to improve children’s school readiness outcomes. The review identifies four evidence-based approaches and describes examples of programs that successfully engage low-income parents and improve children’s outcomes. 

Parent engagement is considered a key element for accreditation of high-quality early childhood programs (for example, see NAEYC, Head Start) serving families of children birth to 5 years. But not all engagement efforts appeal to parents and actively engage them in promoting their children’s school readiness throughout their daily activities.

What Types of Parent Engagement Are Successful in Improving Child Outcomes?

This RWJ review of randomly controlled studies of evidence-based parent engagement approaches found the strongest outcomes in home visiting programs or parent group interventions with one or more of the following aims:

• Promoting positive parenting practices and parent-child relationships. Parents learn to pay attention to their children, set clear expectations and limits, and reinforce positive behavior rather than using negative parenting practices.

• Promoting home learning activities and effective teaching strategies. Parents receive and learn how to use developmentally appropriate toys/books/household objects to help their children enjoy and enhance learning opportunities.

• Strengthening parent-teacher partnerships. Teachers build communication and collaborative planning with parents to support children’s development that goes far beyond parents simply volunteering in the classroom.

• Emphasizing child physical health. Parents learn about the benefits of healthy eating and physical activity for themselves and their children, including specific strategies for building health lifestyles in their homes.

The RWJ report concludes:

“Evidence from rigorous research studies suggests that the parent engagement programs that support the most vulnerable families and effectively reduce gaps in child school readiness associated with socio-economic disadvantage must be intensive and strategic, considerably longer and more involved than the kinds of parent engagement practices that are widespread in preschools now.”

(Parent Engagement Practices Improve Outcomes for Preschool Children, page 9)

To strategically pinpoint which of the 4 types of parent engagement listed above would be most effective with your families, consider using an observational parenting assessment, like KIPS.  KIPS addresses the first 2 of the 4 approaches by assessing each parent’s strengths and needs related to parenting practices, his/her parent-child relationship and teaching strategies. For the 3rd approach, KIPS can be used to strengthen parent-staff partnerships by working together to build nurturing parent-child interactions that promote children’s development. 

Offering families a parenting assessment in which parents and staff observe their parent-child interactions together helps parents learn about their strengths and areas for growth. The KIPS parenting assessment is a tool to guide these observations by focusing on a set of 12 parenting behaviors that are proven to promote children’s development and school readiness.  KIPS observations can unlock insights into parenting for both families and staff, and point to specific skills that would enhance the parent-child relationship. 

We have RWJ and Penn State University to thank for this collaborative effort.  The authors are Karen Bierman, PhD, at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, Pennsylvania State University, Pamela Morris, PhD, at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University and Rachel Abenavoli, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at New York University.