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Family engagement is a collaborative and strengths-based process through which early childhood professionals, families, and children build positive and goal-oriented relationships. It is a shared responsibility of families and staff at all levels that requires mutual respect for the roles and strengths each has to offer. Family engagement focuses on culturally and linguistically responsive relationship-building with key family members in a child’s life. These people include pregnant women and expectant families, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and other adult caregivers. It requires making a commitment to creating and sustaining an ongoing partnership that supports family well-being. It also honors and supports the parent-child relationships that are central to a child’s healthy development, school readiness, and well-being. The Office of Head Start Parent, Family, and Community Engagement Framework is a guide to learning how family engagement promotes positive, enduring change for children, families, and communities.
When families share their stories with staff, it can be an emotional experience. Staff can encourage storytelling by sharing experiences or goals they may have in common with families. Recognizing these common ties and honoring the storytelling process can help strengthen relationship between staff and families.
Storytelling helps build strong relationships and supports effective family partnership agreements. Learning about families’ past experiences, strengths, and needs in an authentic way can help staff support meaningful progress for children, families, and communities.
Storytelling can be a highly emotional process, especially when families have faced traumatic events, are dealing with ongoing issues, or face problems that staff don’t feel equipped to handle. In this video, program staff reflect on the importance of communication, self-care, and having a network of support is for working effectively working with families.
The process of storytelling can help programs truly empower families. Hear from program staff about how storytelling has changed their Head Start/Early Head Start program for the better. Staff share how they hope this series of videos will help strengthen the work that providers do with migrant families.
Watch this series of documentary-style videos about the power of storytelling. Explore the impact of hearing the stories of a family when working toward positive outcomes for families and children.
This guide outlines ways to use the Engaging Fathers video as a professional development tool with program staff. It provides a simple structure to organize discussion, highlights PFCE Framework themes to consider, and lists a few questions to prompt a conversation about the strategies staff might use to influence positive family outcomes.
Programs collect and use a variety of family related data. This set of resources assist programs to gather, analyze, and share data with families that includes their voices and honors their perspectives.
The partnership between parents and staff is fundamental to children's current and future success in school readiness and beyond. Discover how programs can share information with families about children's learning and progress toward school readiness outcomes.
Programs are provided background information on the critical roles that fathers play in early childhood literacy in this tip sheet. Fathers are concerned about the entire family, as well as the special role that children play in family dynamics. This tip sheet stresses the role of fathers in the community as supports for each other and for community building.
Explore this set of resources designed to support Latino fathers as early literacy models for their children. The resources outline creating father-friendly environments, building community supports, sharing stories, and supporting early literacy for young children. Many of the resources and activities are in English and Spanish.
HeadStart.gov
official website of the Administration for Children and Families
