Trauma-Responsive Family Engagement in Early Childhood

Practices for Equity and Resilience

Julie Nicholson, Julie Kurtz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367650650
• eBook ISBN: 9781000433975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Designed for all professionals working with parents and families of young children, this practical guide offers comprehensive resources for building trauma-responsive family engagement in your school or program. Throughout this book, you'll find:

• Evidence-based practices that promote trauma-response family engagement.
• Exercises and tools for identifying the strengths and learning edges within your program, school, or agency.
• Vignettes from people and programs striving to create trusting, asset-focused partnerships with families that improve equity and promote culturally responsive practices.
• Reflective inquiry questions and sample conversations to help you examine your own practices.

With concrete examples and easy-to-implement strategies, this critical book helps readers put theory into practice while providing essential support for individuals and groups both new to and experienced with trauma-responsive practices in early childhood.

1

When We Talk About Parents and Families, Who Is Included?

Family engagement is a family-centered, strengths-based approach to establishing and maintaining relationships with families and accomplishing change together…Family engagement happens in the home, early childhood programs, and the community. It is a shared responsibility of all those who want children to succeed in school and in life. Parents and others who care for their children work together to prepare children for success. When families, communities, and early learning programs work together, young children are more successful and the entire community benefits.

(Quality Counts California Family Engagement Toolkit, 2019, p. 4)

When We Talk About Parents and Families, Who Is Included?

Before we can discuss trauma-responsive family engagement, we have to establish a shared understanding for what we mean when we refer to “parents” and “families.” When we use these terms, we strive to acknowledge all adult caregivers who have a meaningful role in a child’s life. Specifically:

• Parents refers to biological, adoptive, and step-parents as well as primary caregivers, such as grandparents, other adult family members, kinship caregivers and foster or resource parents
• Families can be biological or nonbiological, chosen or circumstantial. They are connected through culture, language, tradition, shared experiences, emotional commitment, and mutual support (ECLKC, n.d., p. 1).

Traditional Approaches to Working with Parents and Families

We need to understand the difference between family involvement and family engagement. One of the dictionary definitions of involve is to “enfold or envelop,” whereas one of the meanings of engagement implies engage is “to come together and interlock.” Thus, involvement implies doing to; in contrast, engagement implies doing with. A school striving for family involvement often leads with its mouth—identifying projects, needs, and goals and then telling parents how they can contribute. A school striving for parent engagement, on the other hand, tends to lead with its ears—listening to what parents think, dream, and worry about. The goal of family engagement is not to serve clients but to gain partners.

(Ferlazzo, 2011, pp. 10–11)

Historically, early childhood programs have interacted with parents and families using an approach described as parent and family involvement. Traditional strategies for parent and family involvement include sharing information with parents about school events, offering parenting advice, organizing volunteering activities for parents (e.g., driving on field trips) and encouraging parents to reinforce the school/program’s expectations and learning activities in the home (see Epstein, 1992).

Parents participate in activities, attend meetings and special events and “take advantage of opportunities at their child’s early care and learning setting.”

(USDHHS, 2018, p. 3)

Characteristics of Parent–Family Involvement

• Based in deficit thinking. Many parent and family involvement strategies are based in deficit thinking as they inherently seek to “fix” or “remediate” parents and incentivize changes to their behavior to better align with dominant values, norms and expectations (Baquedano-López, Alexander & Hernandez, 2013; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López & Alvarez, 2000; Ishimaru & Takahashi, 2017).
  • “Doing to”: An early childhood program using a family involvement approach, “leads with its mouth” (Ferlazzo, 2012). What does that mean? Topics and goals for parents’ and families’ education, events and activities are often pre-determined and led/facilitated by the school or program staff or outside experts (Ferlazzo, 2012). Parents and families are told how they can contribute. This is referred to as a school-centric approach (Lawson, 2003) and often positions parents as passive and complacent (Baquedano-López et al., 2013) as they are rarely perceived or invited—especially nondominant¹ parents—as having the capacity or given the opportunities to influence decision-making in the early-learning program or school.
• One-way communication. Communication and requests for parent and family involvement is typically initiated by program staff and intended to go in one direction (Ferlazzo, 2011):
  School/Program → → → → Parents and Families
  For example: A teacher might call a family to share information about a child’s behavior at preschool; an expert on early literacy might share recommended practices for book reading in the home at a parent meeting; a newsletter might offer information on a new discipline policy; an automated phone call welcomes parents to a new school year or an email is sent with requests for donations or volunteer support for a program food drive.
• Focused on “what happens here.” Parent and family involvement efforts focus on their roles within the “four walls of the school” (Ferlazzo, 2012, p. 2).

Involvement Is “Necessary but Not Sufficient”

Parent and family involvement is associated with many benefits for children, families and early childhood programs. Involvement is the primary approach used in early childhood programs, schools and agencies. One way to think about involvement is a “necessary but not sufficient” approach to working with parents and families. If you have a strong involvement program at your site, continue doing what is working well and what you are proud of. And, build awareness about the limitations of this approach.

Limitations of “Involvement” Approaches

It’s not that family involvement is bad. Almost all the research says that any kind of increased parent interest and support of students can help. But almost all the research also says that family engagement can produce even better results—for students, for families, for schools, and for their communities.

(Ferlazzo, 2011)

As described above, a major concern of parent and family involvement approaches are the deficit assumptions that position parents and families as “lacking and in need of support” (see Valencia, 1991, 2011) in knowledge, skills, capacity, motivation, care, ability and promise. Schools, programs and agencies are positioned as the “experts” who can “fix” parents and their children to better conform to the school’s or society’s expectations (often White, Eurocentric and middle-class). Parents might be described as partners but the “partnerships” may unfortunately frame parents as problems (Baquedano-López, et al, 2013). Deficit language and assumptions are the root of cycles of oppression, prejudice, discrimination and bias (Valencia, 2011). They negatively impact “all parents, but the negative equity outcomes of these beliefs and practices particularly affect parents from nondominant backgrounds” (Baquedano-López et al., 2013, p. 150).

The traditional model of parent involvement often boils down to well-intentioned efforts to “fix” individual parents so that they better conform to the school’s expectations (Ishimaru et al., 2019). The term parent involvement typically suggests a view wherein parents are involved in ways defined by the school and directed towards achieving goals that parents have no part in setting. In this type of relationship, power is held by the school rather than being shared between the school and the families (Gillanders, Iruka, Bagwell, Morgan & Garcia, 2014, p. 125).

Parent and family involvement does not acknowledge how power, race, culture, class, immigration, ability, gender and language impact the inequitable contexts that influence families’ opportunities and experiences with involvement (Baquedano-López, Alexander & Hernandez, 2013; Fine, 1993; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2009; Olivos, 2006). By ignoring these factors, traditional family involvement policies and “best practices” have imagined early childhood programs, schools and agencies as neutral spaces that position everyone equally. This ignores our nation’s history of institutional racism and the differential treatment of families including the types of involvement they are invited to participate in (Baquedano-López et al., 2013).

The Shift towards Family Engagement

The shift for me after 28 years of doing this work with families is turning it over from a deficit based perspective (“they’re in need or they need to learn or change something”) to an asset-informed approach (“they know their child best”).

(Shawn Bryant, Founding Director & Chief Learning Officer at Teaching Excellence Center)

The goal of family engagement is not to serve clients but to gain partners.

(Ferlazzo, 2011, p. 2)

The perspective of home-school partnership requires that teachers view families as a resource rather than a liability.

(Gillanders, McKinney & Richie, 2012, p. 132)

Increasingly, researchers, policymakers, child and family advocates and early childhood professionals are rejecting the deficit-based assumptions underlying traditional parent education and involvement approaches and recognizing that the only way to effectively support children’s learning and healthy development is to build trusting relationships with parents and families and to collaboratively engage with them in power-sharing partnerships. Parent and family engagement differs from a parent and family involvement approach in several ways.

Characteristics of a Parent and Family Engagement Approach

• Strength-based and asset-informed: “Doing with.” In a genuine partnership, all participants teach and learn from one another and everyone is assumed to have valuable contributions to share. Aligned with this belief, all families are believed to have strengths, assets, skills and knowledge about their child’s learning and development that is valuable and essential for early childhood professionals to learn about. For this reason, a family engag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Introduction: An Urgent Need for Trauma-Sensitive Family Engagement Practices in Early Childhood
• 1 When We Talk About Parents and Families, Who Is Included?
• 2 Understanding State Dependent Functioning: The Importance of Maintaining Regulation in Trauma-Responsive Environments
• 3 Foundations of High-Quality Family Engagement
• 4 CORE PRINCIPLE: Understand Stress and Trauma
• 5 CORE PRINCIPLE: Acknowledge Systems of Privilege and Oppression and Take Actions to Disrupt Inequity
• 6 CORE PRINCIPLE: Establish Safety and Predictability
• 7 CORE PRINCIPLE: Provide Opportunities for Agency and Control
• 8 CORE PRINCIPLE: Promote Coping, Resilience, Healing and Wellness
• 9 Father Engagement: Intentionally Planning for and Centering Fathers and Father Figures in Early Childhood
• 10 Case Studies: Applying Ideas throughout the Book to Your Practice
• Conclusion
• Resources
• A Note About the Cover