Engaging with Parents in Early Years Settings

Dianne Jackson, Martin Needham, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446258958, 9781446258941
• eBook ISBN: 9781473906389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

?It is inspiring to see a text which attempts to shift our worldview. This shift could give us the chance to achieve more open, inclusive, democratic early childhood practice that has the capacity to answer the deeper questions and which sees both parents and children as powerful and positive agents in their own futures?
- Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram, Directors of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC)

The role of parents in the early years is fundamental. In order to achieve the best outcomes for children, mutually beneficial relationships between parents and practitioners need to underpin children's care and learning.

There are many services for children and many different settings in which care and education can take place.  Whether you work in children's centres, outreach and dual-focused services, preschools, kindergartens or schools this book will help you develop the skills and strategies to work alongside parents whatever your role.

Focussing on:

• The importance of involving parents
• The nature of learning
• How to engage and build relationships with parents
• How to reflect on and develop shared learning environment in settings
• Transitions and attachment

This book has examples taken from real settings and practical advice to help you put the ideas into practice. Reading and using it will help ensure the wellbeing and development of all children in your care.

Dianne Jackson is an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Western Sydney and the CEO of Connect Child and Family Services

Martin Needham is Academic Division Leader: Education, Professional and Community Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University

PART 1

PARENTS, CHILDREN AND PRACTITIONERS TOGETHER

CHAPTER 1

The nature of human development

Chapter overview

Chapter 1 offers a summary of the factors which we believe are important to bear in mind when seeking to support young children’s development. The process of learning shaped by the nature of the human mind and its desire to make sense of the natural and social worlds is outlined. This is followed by a review of the processes that exist within families which interact with, guide and shape, the child’s social, emotional and cognitive development. We stress the value of focusing on dispositions towards life and learning compared with the immediate transfer of knowledge from adults to children. In the final part of the chapter we seek to illustrate how relationships and interactions enacted within the context of practitioner-supported parent and child groups offer valuable opportunities for parents, children and practitioners to learn from each other.

Introduction

In this book we explore the role that professionals can play in working with parents to support young children’s development and education. We argue that this role needs to be considered in the context of a rapidly changing modern era and with increasing the understanding and expectations of the importance of early childhood. At face value this does not appear to be too controversial, however, since the introduction of the idea of the welfare state following the Second World War, this has proved to be difficult to put into practice and controversial in terms of the relationship between state and the home. We will examine the competing interests and potential barriers to the exchange of knowledge between parents and practitioners in later chapters but we begin by considering the nature of what it is to be human, how humans learn and the role of society and family in facilitating that learning. We concentrate on the way day-to-day experiences shape children, these are in one sense very ordinary, but reflect the extraordinary nature of what it is to be human and how that humanity is passed from one generation to the next.

Children, parents and professionals learning together

Many societies are increasingly coming to an understanding of the importance of early childhood and many are shifting from a view of infants as helpless, empty vessels, who might be swaddled and restrained and who should speak only when spoken to (Maybin and Woodhead, 2003). Instead young children are now being viewed as resilient, active learners, who are eager to explore their world and to engage with others. We see them as hard wired to make sense of the world and eager to participate in activity using play as a tool to develop mastery over skills, ideas and practices on the way to becoming valued members of society.

This shift in attitudes towards children, along with rapidly changing social structures, demands that we reflect on the changing processes and patterns of child-rearing. There is not necessarily a tension between an individual’s and society’s model of the world, however there is a dynamic between the two. This dynamic is not purely rational and embedded in the logic of the world; it is also influenced by traditions, emotions and preferences. What we accept to be true as individuals, as groups and as societies is evolving over time as we learn more, develop new tools and live in new ways that respond to changing circumstances.

Issues of care, play, discipline and social relationships continue to be renegotiated by each new generation of parents according to the contexts in which they find themselves. With this in mind, this book aims to reflect on key ideas and research processes that enable practitioners to work alongside children and parents together, and to be responsive to changing circumstances. We begin with an account of an interconnected view of development that indicates how attitudes, life and learning might be shaped in relationships with parents and communities.

Human nature

The first decade of a new millennium has seen a flourishing of new scientific tools for the study of human development; brain scanning techniques and genetic sequencing have reopened old debates about our nature and nurture and informed the increasing interest in the ways in which we raise children in our rapidly changing societies (Goswami, 2008). The unravelling of the human genome is also making it increasingly clear that humans are creatures which share much in common, not just with near neighbours such as the great apes, but also with creatures which appear to be very different, such as mice and reptiles. Theories of learning now need to explain how we learn through the mechanisms of perception which have evolved through millennia of ancestors and which continue to shape the way in which we experience the world (Dawkins, 2004).

Darwin (1928) outlines how species of bee and finch are shaped by the way they interact with the environment and suggests that one can tell one species from another, not necessarily by their appearance but by what they do: that is, their phenotype. The revelation of the similarity of our genetics to other creatures, highlights that humanity is remarkable because of its use of complex socialised tools such as language and the everyday systems that form cultures. The idea that humans have evolved and are defined by the nature of what they do is at the centre of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Vygotsky and Piaget studied children’s development through their interactions with their environments. This underpins their theories of learning and they are the two most cited influences on the way we now plan support for children’s development (Athey, 2007). Piaget (1950) argued that humans are born curious, with a desire to make sense of the world and that the understanding they develop is shaped by the way they process their experiences.

Vygotsky (1986) argued that children’s development is shaped and sculpted by the activities that society has to offer. So the activities, tools, words and thoughts that cultures have evolved, shape the minds of each new generation. The study of the interaction between organisms’ genetic drivers and their environment is called epigenetics, and it is something that Piaget and Vygotsky were both interested in but studied in slightly different ways.

Pinker (2002) demonstrated that the interplay between environment and genetics is much more sensitive than first thought. Sharot (2012) suggests that actions and environment around the time of conception and through the antenatal period influence not just the physical nature of children at birth, but also their dispositions to development. Just as surprisingly, behaviours throughout the life period can amend and alter the trajectory of physical development. Rogoff (1990) asserts that from birth, children’s development occurs in a biologically given social matrix characteristic of our species. Different communities produce variations in the specific genetic and special resources of new individual members, and these variations are as essential to understanding human development as are the genetic and social resources that humans have in common.

This initial chapter considers the holistic way that children’s cognitive knowledge develops, driven by their genetic inheritance and shaped by their actions and environment. It highlights the factors that might inform the structure and format of activities and environments which are deliberately structured for parents and children to share together.

The human infant’s mind and society

In early education we are increasingly secure in the value of offering children opportunities to explore and make sense of their environment. We regard children under 3 as active participants in developing their own learning rather than passively evolving organisms. Piaget (1950) argued that development was epigenetic, suggesting that the mind was programmed to develop in certain ways and that it was necessary to engage with experiences to realise potential.

Modern research affirms Piaget’s constructivist perspective and suggests that knowledge is formed through the interplay between genetic meaning-making and pattern-seeking, programming the brain with experience. The brain may be much more flexible then was thought previously and may be constructed to function in different ways by the environments and tools to which humans adapt. We now know that the first three years of life see the activation of tremendous networks of connections between the neurones in children’s brains. This happens in unique patterns through interaction with the sights, smells, tastes, feelings and thoughts that they encounter (Mareschal, et al. 2004).

Children’s everyday experiences are absorbed holistically and patterns of similar sensory experience gradually become associated and linked through the formation of dendritic connections in the brain. These patterns of connection in turn filter future events in unique ways to the individual. The sensorimotor period, associated with Piaget (1950) occurs during the first two years and continues to be characterised by children investigating their world through each of their senses and through patterns of movement. These then form their frameworks for referencing and understanding the world.

What neuroscience investigations have also revealed is the rapid development of connections between neurones in the brain. This development peaks in early childhood and is followed by the reduction or pruning of less used synapses and the strengthening of frequently used pathways beyond the age of 5 towards adulthood (Goswami, 2008). One suggestion for this phenomenon is that the familiarity of particular experiences channel and strengthen particular patterns in the brain and that rarely used connections dissipate. It is also hypothesised that the development of language and other shared cultural tools may also help to structure ideas into groups and thus assist this process of shaping the workings of the mind.

Such a view lends support for the increasing role of culture in shaping our thinking in particular ways. It is this sociocultural dimension which Vygotsky and his colleagues, Luria and Leont’ev (Leont’ev, 1978) identified when they realised that humans raised in similar literate environments came to think using similar tools and in ways which were significantly different to those raised in isolated rural communities with no schooling or literacy (Leont’ev, 1978). They suggested that the reason that we are able to communicate is that our general physical and emotional needs are similar and that for much of human history the tools we have used are similar.

Thus children construct their mental models of the world in a very social context. One in which they are guided by their introduction into participation in social activities. Most languages have evolved similar ideas and have equivalent words. Children follow similar patterns of becoming walking, talking, social beings because their genetic growth is similar and because they are raised in social communities that have developed over the last 20 millennia.

Key idea: an ecological perspective

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective of human development provides a foundation for the investigation of relationships between children, parents and professionals. This perspective forms a central framework for linking the ideas in this book together, so is helpful to begin with a consideration of Bronfenbrenner’s view of children’s development.

Bronfenbrenner (1979) saw children’s development as being influenced by a complex system of interconnected relationships. He emphasised the dynamic nature of the interactions between children and their environments and acknowledged the many influences on development that arise from a diverse range of relationships. This is one of the strengths of the ecological model.

The ecological model includes five systems that range from direct interactions between people to broad contexts of culture. These systems are known as microsystems, ecosystems, exosystems, macrosystems and chrono-systems. Any relationships which occur between children and their immediate environments are referred to as microsystems and include families and peers. Mesosystems result from the interrelationships between two or more microsystems that children participate in, for example, the interrelationship between home (one microsystem) and parent/child groups (another microsystem).

Settings that affect children but that they are not directly involved in, such as parents’ workplaces, are known as exosystems. The macrosystems within the model refer to beliefs and attitudes within the cultures in which children live and the chronosystem refers to patterns of environmental events and transitions that influence the life course.

Recommended further reading

Bronfenbrenner, H. (1979) The Ecology of Human Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

This book focuses on the interrelationship between two mesosystems: children’s homes and dual-focused groups. It highlights the ability of these interrelationships to engender what Bronfenbrenner describes as molar change, that is, lasting embedded dispositions toward learning. What we have learned about the nature and power of the bond between significant adults and children through the work of John Bowlby (1988) is also critical to these interrelationships and is explored in the following section.

Attachment

From the discussion above we can see that children’s early ye...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the authors
• Acknowledegments
• Preface
• Foreword
• Part 1 PARENTS, CHILDREN AND PRACTITIONERS TOGETHER
• Part 2 A PLACE TO BE AND A SPACE TO GROW
• Part 3 LEARNING TO LEARN IN SUPPORTED PLAYGROUPS
• CONCLUDING CHAPTER
• Index