Parent Skill-Building
Parents play the most central and formative role in children’s lives. The importance of loving, responsive and caring adults in the lives of children is central to children’s healthy development. But parenting also can be stressful, frustrating and confusing. All parents have questions and concerns about their children, but not everyone has trusted sources for the answers they need. Further, given the explosion over the last 20 years in new research and insights into child development, all parents can benefit from information and support while raising their children. In Florida, however, parents often do not know where to find information. The Movement has and will continue to work to make parent skill-building information available statewide – through both 24-hour phone lines and the Internet..
Research
Babies begin processing the world around them from the moment they are born and their brains rapidly develop – or fail to develop – in response to the stimulation they receive. Parents play the most central and formative role children have in their lives. The importance of loving, responsive, and caring adults in the lives of children is central to children’s healthy development.
But parenting also can be stressful, frustrating and confusing. All parents have questions and concerns about their children, but not everyone has trusted sources for the answers they need. Further, given the explosion over the last 20 years in new research and insights into child development, all parents can benefit from information and support as they are raising their children.
Research and experience now prove that high-quality information for parents can make a difference for all families. Parent initiatives are designed to increase parental knowledge of child development, provide examples of safe and healthy things to do with children, build skills for managing the challenges of parenting, and, in more intensive initiatives, provide support during challenging times.
A number of parent skill-building courses have calculated the benefits of participation, comparing the outcomes of participants to non-participants. More intensive programs have documented that for every dollar spent on a parent-skill program, taxpayers can save $3 in later costs for treatment or remediation, with almost $6 saved for every dollar that assists high-risk mothers. One of many key findings: Children of parents who participated in these programs were as much as 22 percent less likely to commit a crime later.
In Florida, however, parents often do not know where to go to find information. As part of an overall public awareness campaign about the importance of early development and effective nurturing, we must provide and publicize a statewide phone line and website in English, Spanish and Creole. These services should build on successful models, such as those in Miami-Dade County and elsewhere in the state, and be available statewide at no fee to families.
Though knowledge about young children’s development has exploded in the last two decades, parents often are unaware of what is now known about how to best support children’s development. As a consequence, we must make developmental information available to families who choose to access it by regular e mails that are based on their child’s birth date.
Our main emphasis is early childhood development, but we also know that parents of older children and teens have particular problems in finding helpful information. We propose working with an organization called GreatSchools to make its online parental tutorials widely available. GreatSchools has developed an initiative called College Bound, an online video and social-media program that helps parents gain the skills they need to guide their children’s children to academic success from pre-kindergarten through high school.
Read the full proposal here.