Giving Compass' Take:

• Programs like Parents as Teachers engage with young at-risk parents by doing home visits and providing tools that parents need to provide children with healthy and appropriate early development skills. 

• An essential component of the program is that it helps parents create relationships with their schools. How can other programs replicate this model? 

• Read about how early childhood communities are looking at opportunity zones. 

Parents are their children’s first and most influential teachers, so effective engagement between parent and school needs to start early. This is true for all families, but particularly for at-risk families. Parents must be able to use social capital to navigate community systems, seek out opportunities and to know how to persist effectively when a child is not getting what she needs at school.

To support young, inexperienced parents who have not gained the tools needed to effectively approach their child’s school to discuss his needs, home visiting programs can help. Using evidence-based resources, home visitors trained through programs such as Parents as Teachers, which serves almost 200,000 families with children under age 6 in all 50 states, 115 tribal organizations, five countries, and one U.S. territory, support a range of family needs.

They help parents understand how to work in partnership with their school, advocate for their child, support their child’s development, and create a collaborative plan that can lead to better educational outcomes.

In 2017, more than 300,000 families received these services through several research-based home visiting programs over the course of more than 3.5 million home visits. And research demonstrates that home visiting has great benefits for families with young children.

Parents are often referred to home visiting programs by community members such as school employees, caseworkers, or health professionals. Each state determines this process within a budget and partners with approved community providers. Parents as Teachers affiliates, for example, operate in settings including health departments, hospitals, schools, and faith-based and nonprofit organizations.

During these home visits, parents build skills, knowledge, and self-confidence and learn essential tools to shift this paradigm. Parent educators partner with families to implement age-appropriate strategies that develop hard skills such as early literacy and numeracy, foundations critical to kindergarten readiness and success in school.

Read the full article about engaging with at-risk parents by Libby Doggett and Constance Gully at The 74.