Today’s Agenda

Today, many kids are at risk of failure in school because of poverty, dysfunctional home lives and other factors. And educators are struggling to come up with ways to help them.

One innovative program is featured in Making a Difference. The Mar Vista Family Center, in a predominantly Latino area of West Los Angeles, offers a range of family services and has entered in to a partnership with the UCLA Education Extension. Their innovative joint program offers parents training that effectively qualifies them as early childhood educators, thereby giving them a positive role in their kids’ education.

Michelle Wierson, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona College, says that family participation is often the single most critical factor in predicting positive outcomes for children who display mental health problems, criminal behavior, delinquency and acting out. “So it seems to me that making that an explicit part of early childhood programs can only be beneficial.”

“The other thing,” she says, “is that it provides models for parents for good parenting skills and a place to practice and implement them. And it also provides kids with affirmation from their parents of the value of education and (the) teaching process by having them be part of it.”

Another advantage, according to Wierson, is that family-participation programs are empowering to individuals, whether they are low-income or not. “It helps them to place more value and importance on the program if they’re giving to it and becoming part of it and not just receiving it without any information about it,” she says.

The potential drawback is that many families don’t have the flexibility to devote a day, a week or even an afternoon a week to day care because they have very rigid work schedules and employers who don’t allow that kind of autonomy, she says. So participating could come at great cost to a family, or programs may be forced to exclude people who would particularly be in need of them.

“If it meant that the child would have to drop out because the parent did, then you create a situation where there’s no continuity for the kid--where there’s the possibility of having to deal with a very difficult transition out of a day care.”

Wierson says it’s important to have a system for dealing with that issue--that is, allowing the child to stay in for the remainder of the semester or a designated time with his or her peers.

But she says just participating in such a program outweighs any negatives that could arise.

The principles behind such programs are “certainly consistent with the kinds of principles that we know work when there are high-risk kids, and low-income kids happen to be high-risk. It’s consistent with the principle of what makes people feel good and invested in a program, which is to be involved in it and to be empowered by it.”

Parent participation in education and other programs are creative solutions. There may be some pitfalls or risks, but that doesn’t mean that they outweigh the benefits.