#trustparents

Don’t Forget The Families

October 24, 2015

DontForgetFamilies-Report-Cover

The Search Institute has a 2015 study entitled Don’t Forget the Families: The Missing Piece in America’s Effort to Help All Children Succeed. The study looks at how family relationships are a critical, but often overlooked, key to children’s development. The study examined 1,085 parenting adults of 3- to 13-year-olds from across the United States, finding that:

the quality of parent-child relationships is 10 times more powerful than demographics (race, ethnicity, family composition, and family income) in predicting whether children are developing critical character strengths they need for success in school and life. These strengths include being motivated to learn, being responsible, and caring for others.

The study provides a framework of five essential actions for parents. Kids need parents to:

Express Care: Show that you like me and want the best for me.
Challenge Growth: Insist that I try to continuously improve.
Provide Support: Help me complete tasks and achieve goals.
Share Power: Hear my voice and let me share in making decisions.
Expand Possibility: Expand my horizons and connect me to opportunities.

dontforgetfamilies-figure2

These numbers in Figure 2 indicate that parents are quick to express care while not as quick to share power or expand possibilities. These numbers were consistent across all backgrounds with no differences resulting from race, education, household income, etc..

Parents instinctively desire to help their children succeed and guide their children in their development. Yet, the authors of the study point out, parental engagement initiatives are often focused on how parents can support institutions of learning like schools but can â€œoverlook the one thing about which parents care deeply and that can powerfully benefit their childrenâ€™s development: relationships in the home.â€ The authors, expanding on this understanding of families as crucial to child development and learning, write:

There is a rich but perhaps untapped reservoir of relational power across the economic and cultural spectrum in the United States. With intentionality, it has even more potential to address the challenges that young people face while also nurturing in them key character strengths that are foundational for success in life.

This is a great body of research that affirms why it makes sense to #trustparents and to empower families. To read the whole report and access additional resources, click here. I’ve written a series of blog posts on Parental Engagement: here’s a post with more research,Â a post with tips for parents, and here is a link to access the whole series.

#TrustParents

Poverty, Education and Parental Engagement

October 7, 2015

cornfield

Who can help us solve the problem of poverty? Depending on how frame of reference, we might answer this in a number of ways. We might say government agencies, or nonprofit think-tanks, or charitable ministries. Since education is one solution to poverty, we could speak of teachers and school administrators and principals.

While it is true, that all of these people or groups of people have roles to play in ending poverty, it is easy to forget another and perhaps most important group of people: those who live in poverty. In her 2015 TED Talk, Mia Birdsong explains why “the story we tell about poverty isn’t true.” The conventional story of poverty goes like this: those who work hard are successful, therefore those who are unsuccessful (poor) must not be willing to work hard. With this mentality, Mia says, we are “convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing.” She goes on to describe the reality:

Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don’t pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt . . . They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it’s picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice also critiques the notion that poor people on the whole are passive, incompetent, or unmotivated. At the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform, Rice said: “it is such a mistaken impression that poor parents either donâ€™t care or donâ€™t know what is best for their kids.”

If the story we tell ourselves about poverty is wrong, how might we change it? Mia asks us to ponder some what-if questions. “What if we recognized that what’s working is the people and what’s broken is our approach? What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative.”

Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities.

When it comes to the topic of poverty in the context of education reform, it is important to bear in mind what Mia and Condoleeza are highlighting. We need to start with the assumption that poor parents want what’s best for their children, know their children better than anyone else, and are capable of helping their children succeed provided they are supported along the way by the various institutions of civic society: family, neighborhood community, school, library, church, etc..

We should #TrustParents

Below is the complete TED Talk. Click here to watch Condoleeza Rice’s keynote from the 2014 National Summit on Education Reform.

“Like” Me And My Kids on Facebook

August 6, 2015

Parents Magazine has an important article both in their August print edition and online entitledÂ Parenting in a Fakebook World: How Social Media Is Affecting Your Parenting. The article begins by sharing a story of parents oversharing (hint, involves potty training) on Facebook. The article then shares about a Parents SurveyÂ of more than 2,000 respondents: “79 percent said other parents overshare on social media — yet only 32 percent of us think we overshare ourselves. Hmm.”

The article asks, how might this parenting-in-the-age-of-social-media effect children?

“Kids pick up on what their parents like, and Like, from a tender age. “Kids know, ‘When I do something my mom likes or finds funny, she puts it on Instagram,’ ” says Judith Donath, author of the book The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online.”

And since kids understand the fame culture, it’s logical they’d want fame for themselves right?

In one survey of kids ages 9 to 13 at UCLA Digital Media Center, kids who already had their own social-media accounts — and 26 percent under 13 had a YouTube account — craved fame more than those who didn’t.

But not all kids are the same:

“Our children have very different ideas of privacy,” says Patrick Riccards, a father of two in Princeton, New Jersey. “Our son who’s 9 cringes when he learns that we’ve put a picture of him on Facebook or that his aunt posted a baby picture of him on his birthday. He wants a life off the grid — other than the life he’s building for himself on Minecraft.” Riccards says his daughter, 7, is completely different: “She is aching to get on social media. I’ll take a picture or I’ll laugh at something she says, and she immediately asks, ‘Are you going to put that on Facebook?’. Then she asks what people say about her in the comments.”

Here’s the link to the whole article. Also, Patrick Riccards has an educational blog that is worth following: here’s the link.

One takeaway from the study is to talk with your kids about what they want you to share and keep the dialogue going . The second takeaway is to trust other parents, just because they parent differently than you do doesn’t mean the world is about to end. #TrustParents