Family Empowerment

It has been said that the best social program is a strong family. School-linked support efforts must help families fulfill their responsibilities for nurturing their children. Problems confronting parents often affect their children - and the converse can be true as well. Even multiple services offered to and individual may not be helpful if the needs of other family members go unmet. (Council of Chief State School Officers 1992)

Changes in our society have increased the difficulties that families face. Mobility has reduced the availability to extend families that might help with parenting and childbearing. Patterns of increasing two-parent participation in the paid work force, the increase in divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birth, growing numbers of single parent families and teenage parents - all these and others impact on the nation's families' abilities to ensure that young children have the experiences they need to prepare them for school and to give older children the support they need to benefit optimally from educational opportunity. When parents are themselves adolescent students, their own and their children's prospects are bleak indeed.

For too many families, poverty is a critical barrier to providing their children with needed supports. Certainly, children who come to school with key health and social needs unmet are not afforded an equal opportunity to learn. Lack of prenatal care, inadequate nutrition, lack of immunization and preventive care, exposure to violence, drugs or abuse, fetal alcohol abuse syndrome, and the emotional and mental disorders of early childhood are but some of the poverty-linked barriers to learning that no curricular or pedagogical reform alone can remove (Novello, Degraw and Kleinman, 1992).

Any serious and committed effort to create equity of educational opportunity must include a comprehensive approach to empowering families, addressing the health and social environment barriers that limit their effectiveness as children's first teachers, best caretakers and most committed defenders (National Health/Education Consortium 1990; National Commission on the Role of the School and the Community in Improving Adolescent Health 1990). As the Committee for Economic Development has warned:

No matter how much money you pump into schools, no matter how well you pay the teachers, fine-tune the curricula, or enrich the programs, you do not address the critical needs of a substantial segment of students unless you also concern yourself with nutrition, health, care, housing, and family functioning - the factors that determine the early development of the child. If children are hungry or abused, if their minds are paralyzed by fear, or if they live in cramped squalid tenements, it is unlikely they will do will in school (Hewlett 1991).

The dimensions of the national need for family empowerment should sober anyone who has ever expressed concern about "international competitiveness". The Carnegie Corporation (1994) reports that:

Compared with most other industrialized countries, the United States has a higher infant mortality rate, a higher proportion of low-birthweight babies, a smaller proportion of babies immunized against childhood diseases, and a much higher rate of babies born to adolescent mothers. Of the twelve million children under the age of three in the United States today, a staggering number are affected by one or more risk factors that undermine healthy development. One in four lives in poverty. One in four lives in a single-parent family. One in three victims of physical abuse is a baby under the age of one.

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has become a strong voice for family empowerment. It notes that within strong, supportive families, children develop a range of skills and competencies essential for meeting the responsibilities of adulthood - competencies related to health and well-being, personal and social functioning, cognitive and creative development, vocational choice and pursuit, and citizenship. Families in distress may need assistance to provide basic care, comfort, and nurture for their children - assistance that may include financial and other help in providing basic necessities such as shelter and medical care. Children and youth may also suffer illness, or mental disabilities, learning disorders or behavioral problems requiring individualized interventions.

As educators, we share responsibility for preparing our nation's youth for adulthood with families and numerous agencies and organizations. These groups include public and private human service agencies, the public health system, private health care providers, the courts, religious organizations, institutions of higher education, and other national and community-based nonprofit organizations. We believe that working jointly to support the development of children and youth is the most effective strategy for the prevention of youth problems and the achievement of our educational goals. (CCSSO 1992)

Family empowerment is not a simple goal. Together, schools and communities must seek ways to address many facets of empowerment to support and strengthen the positive influence of the family. The following outlines some ways that families may be empowered so that the futures of all children and youth will be more hopeful.

Parenting Education and Programs
Early Childhood Education
Collaborative Services
Empowerment Through Leadership and Team Development
Barriers and Impact Points

Parenting Education and Programs

Too often, as a society, we seem to assume what clearly is untrue; that the biological ability to produce a child ensures an ability to provide for the child's needs. Parenting and providing nurture for a child's development is a complex, demanding and critical task. As Hamburg (1992) has pointed out, the prenatal months and first five years of a child's life are characterized by "rapid growth, specific environmental needs, maximum dependence on caretakers, great vulnerability and long-time consequences of failures in development." This initial phase of a child's development has a strong impact on his/her entire future life. In this period, a child not only forms attachments that shape his or her possibilities for human relationships and social skills but also the building blocks for learning skills (Hamburg 1992). Frederick Goodwin (1993), Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, asserts that the quality of parenting and early stimulation during the first five years can modify the child's IQ by as much as 20 points. The consequences of early childhood damage are seen, especially in poor communities, across the nation.

Most parents of all groups want their children to succeed in their learning activities. But many are unaware of the simple, but powerful and inexpensive, things they can do to further their children's development. We can make a major contribution to educational equity and to the economic and social well-being of the nation by ensuring that all parents can prepare their children for school and have the knowledge, skills and resources to support them adequately in their education.

Adolescent parents are especially in need of support, counseling and knowledge to meet their infants' and their own needs. Adolescent fathers too often stumble in to fatherhood with no preparation or clear sense of responsibility. Too often, as well, they are the inheritors of gender biases and stereotypes that prevent their assumption of any meaningful role as a parent and that increase, rather than reduce, the problems faced by their female partners.

Adolescent mothers are at risk for giving birth to babies that are low birth weight, addicted to drugs or who have AIDS (Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium and The Network 1993). Equally tragic is the risk that bearing a child currently poses for an adolescent mother's own quality-of-life expectations, since the age at which she bears her first child is closely related to her chances of living in poverty and becoming dependent of welfare (Child Trends 1992). This is particularly urgent when we realize that less than 3 percent of adolescent pregnancies result in placements for adoption (Bachrach et al. 1992). We must greatly improve and increase the availability of programs that meet the needs of adolescent mothers, as persons in their own right, as well as the health and well-being needs of their babies.

Several states and localities already provide parenting programs that foster empowerment. For example, Missouri's Parents as Teachers Program provides health screening, home visits, consultations, classes, parenting education during pregnancy to any individual or family regardless of income level, and referrals to other services. It provides strong evidence of the value of integrating parenting education with health care and social stimulation. Sound and effective parenting programs ensure (Hamburg 1992):

Comprehensiveness:
Parenting education services need to include health care, social and other family support services (e.g., family planning, day care and substance-abuse programs) and should give serious attention to convenience of access to services.

Continuity:
Each child should have continuing relationships with professionals who know him/her, know his/her family, and know the family's background.

Coordination:
School, preschool, social services and health care should be connected to provide a "seamless web" of services.

Accessibility:
Outreach is essential. Many of the children most in need of health, social and educational services are not receiving them now; their parents do not know what they are, where they are or how to make use of them. Services must be accessible , and service providers must be able to deal with clients' linguistic and cultural diversity.

Accountability:
Quality control is an essential element of parenting programs that meet high professional standards for both practice and prevention. Successful parenting programs not only meet an immediate need for services, but also establish a foundation of prevention that will reduce future problems and costs.

Early Childhood Education

Early childhood education programs foster children's physical, social, and language development and general learning. Today, a majority of young children are served by some type of early childhood, pre-kindergarten programs provided by public and private resources and implemented through a variety of approaches. A consistent finding of research on early childhood programs is that while all groups of children benefit form them, poor children benefit the most, receiving stimulation and experiences that they may not find at home.

Increasing numbers of public school have extended their services in response to the needs of three- to five-year olds. Their programs include Head Start, fee for service programs, tax supported programs, and programs funded by philanthropy. They can make a difference for children, especially when they are high-quality child development programs. While there will always be a need for diversity of providers of preschool education, public schools need to continue to extend services to this area, since there is strong evidence that quality preschool programs contribute to current learning potential and future outcomes. Benefits to society include increased participation in education, reduced crime and delinquency, improved work skills and productivity, reduced welfare dependency and better health (Taylor and Piche 1991; CCSSO 1992; Melaville 1991). Early childhood education is not only an effective tool for individual and family empowerment; it is also a worthwhile community and social investment. Mandatory full-day kindergarten and increased funding for early childhood programs such as Head Start would be a good beginning.

Collaborative Services

The fragmented state of child and family health, social services, education, job training and assistance program,s is a growing concern among educational policy makers, scholars and communities. When strict boundaries exist among schools, human service agencies, the private sector and other important elements of the community, they too often foster a competitive climate (particularly where fund raising is concerned) and produce duplicative, fragmented and disconnected services to a fragmented and bewildered client population. Efforts to remedy this wasteful state of affairs have produced a variety of approaches, from the "Safeway" school of one-stop services, to the learning community with schools as the hub of services to all ages, to partnership programs, and to integrated programs and centers for health, education, social services, recreation and adult education. For many, finding a way to link the school with other community entities in a network of support for families on behalf of children makes good sense. As the Council of Chief State School Officers (1992) puts it:

The notions of school-linked and community-based support systems are not inherently in conflict. A wide range of agencies, organizations and citizen groups must contribute the expertise and resources to better support children and families. In addition to the school's unparalleled access to students and families, there are other advantages to the school's substantial involvement in such efforts. For example, where school facilities are under-used, they can be used to meet other community needs. Moreover, providing certain services at or near the school site - day care for teen parents for example - can help keep young people in school. Making support services available to all students at or near the school site can also lessen any stigma associated with seeking assistance, thereby increasing access to and use of prevention services.

Breaking the usual pattern of isolation between education and social services at the highest level, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently joined efforts to address the connections between family needs and children's prospects for school success. The result of their collaboration was a document titled Together We Can: A Guide for Crafting a Profamily System of Education and Human Services, Which states:

A pro-family system will eventually benefit the entire community and the many neighborhoods where children and families live. Creating such a system will require the united efforts of many partners - key leaders from different sectors who come together to find solutions to shared problems... a collaborative is a group of community leaders who have agreed to be partners in addressing shared problems. The collaborative undertakes an initiation - a series of interrelated activities designed [to] solve these shared problems and create a new system of services for children and families. How far these partners move beyond the status quo will depend on whether they choose a cooperative or collaborative strategy to guide their planning and action. (U.S. Department of Education 1993)

Table I, "A Continuum of School-Community Partnerships" provides a comparative look at three models for school-community linking:

  1. Institutional One-On-One (direct partnership between one school/one community entity or organization);
  2. Cooperative Agreements (one or more schools agree with one or more community partners to cooperate in pursuit of individual goals);
  3. Comprehensive Collaboratives (school/schools community partners collaborate to establish common goals and agree to use their personal and institutional power to achieve them).

The value of the comprehensive collaborative model is that it seeks to bring about systemic, community change rather than to achieve the more limited goal of coordinating available programs. While any of the approaches noted above can make a difference for children and their families, approaches to systemic change are likely to be more effective and have greater impact. Its key elements include: