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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.
Explore these comprehensive tools that help programs assess relationships, through an insight at the relationships between families and providers, teachers, and family services staff for children birth to 5 years of age.
Professionals were interested in training opportunities that allowed them to get to know the work of other agencies. This session is a cross-training professional development opportunity creates that provides an opportunity for 3 groups of professionals who work with families of young children, such as Child Support, Head Start. and Probation and Parole staff to learn about the work of each other’s agencies and to build relationships that will allow them to better serve families and fathers. Nearly 100 participants evaluated the training highly, with 85% agreeing that the overall content of the training was very valuable.
The overall goal of Fathers for Life is to strengthen low-income families with children that have fathers who are incarcerated, on probation or on parole.
In this webinar, learn more about relationship-based strategies and effective ways to engage fathers in your program. Find your starting point in making improvements to program environments.
Explore ways to support fathers in your program through effective community partnerships. Learn about the types of community connections that can support paternal well-being.
Find out how staff can partner with fathers to best support their children’s school readiness. Research shows that engaged fathers can have significant positive effects on their children’s cognition, language, and social and emotional development in the preschool years.
Explore this resource to understand the differences between parent involvement and family engagement. Learn why moving from parent involvement to family engagement practices can help you build strong relationships with families.
In this webcast, Head Start Staff discuss how service areas work together to achieve family engagement outcomes which are essential for school readiness success and Kiersten Beigel, Office of Head Start Family and Community Partnerships Specialist, identifies the family engagement outcomes.
Explore this research-based infographic to learn how and why the parent-child relationship is important. Review strategies program supervisors and staff can use the infographic to promote these relationships.
This three-part webinar series focuses on effective and intentional father engagement. Learn how engaging fathers promotes children’s learning and development and strengthens the parent-child relationship.
HeadStart.gov
official website of the Administration for Children and Families
