Print this page

Helping Young Urban Parents

Urban areas have a high percentage of young single parents who can benefit from support from their neighborhood schools. This article describes a variety of approaches for serving these parents.

Introduction

No discussion of school reform or education policy issues these days seems complete without references to "parent involvement." Most educators would agree this term goes far beyond the traditional view of parents as field trip chaperons and cookie bakers – from preparing children for school, to education choice, to new forms of school governance.

Nevertheless, much of the literature still defines parent involvement as those activities supporting what the schools define as involvement, and continues to address what parents should do.

The demographics of urban schools, in particular, are causing this view of parent involvement to be challenged, however, as increasing numbers of very young parents, most of whom are single, poor, and not well-educated, need multiple services to help create a caring environment for their children. The focus of involvement is shifting not to what schools should do for parents, but to how to form genuine school-family partnerships.

Research data on parent involvement that separate out young, low-income and/or minority parents are just emerging. Although, as a sub-group, the young parent is not yet fully addressed in the literature, urban schools increasingly must cope with the consequences of mothers who had babies when they were still very young themselves.

Innovative strategies

Because of working or poor parents, and communities which have become fractured or decayed, schools must re-create the "social capital in the community," says Coleman (1991). This means bringing the parents together to agree upon and to enforce norms that support the goals of the school. He warns, however, that a strong body of parents may not always act how the school wants it to act, but will become advocates for the children of the community.

Davies, Burch, and Johnson (1992) say urban elementary schools participating in the League of Schools Reaching Out are redefining themselves as community institutions, responding to the needs of their troubled environments. They use a number of traditional strategies – open houses, fund-raising fairs, parent conferences, volunteers, intergenerational literacy programs, and advisory and policy councils.

They also have developed three new strategies – parent centers; family support programs, such as home visits and parenting workshops; and school and community organization partnerships, with universities, businesses, civic groups, and such.

Goodson, Swartz, and Millsap (1991) say successful family education programs focus on empowering parents. This means they address those factors that alienate parents from the schools, such as low levels of literacy. Other characteristics include:

• Provision of multiple levels of parent participation – any contact is seen as positive
• Different modes of contact that respond to different parent skills, e.g., home visits are good for those who lack experience in working in groups
• Helping parents move from one type of involvement to another, e.g., from home visits to school settings
• Sensitivity to the literacy levels of parents
• Flexibility in scheduling and location
• Use of ways to create closer bonds with families, such as contracts or support groups

The Willard Model School Parent Center in Norfolk, VA, one of 12 elementary school parent centers, is an example of the range of services this strategy can provide. Parents help select the workshop topics, teachers brief parents at the center every nine weeks on the upcoming curricula, the center provides a game and computer loan library, and its coordinator and teachers visit parents in their homes. During 1990-91, about 80 percent of the parents attended at least one workshop; 71 percent attended two or more. The centers are financed by the school system and Chapter 1.

Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS), a program developed by the Center on Families, Communities, Schools, and Children's Learning at The Johns Hopkins University, makes homework interactive with parents (Epstein, Jackson, & Salinas, 1992). The program has developed 160 prototype interactive homework assignments linked to the curriculum for Baltimore inner-city middle school teachers. Parents help children with such assignments as oral family histories, science experiments in the kitchen, or reports on health topics.

In Indianapolis, families interact with schools via a local cable channel that broadcasts a homework hotline; children and families can get visual answers to questions about homework assignments (Epstein, 1992). To counteract low attendance at school meetings, some schools are using tape recordings, videocassettes, or answering machines in schools or classrooms which can send and receive timely messages. Others organize volunteer work for parents to do at home or on weekends.

Conclusion

Despite the growing amount of research on parent involvement in high-poverty urban schools and number of practices to choose from, it is too early to say what works in the long-term and why. Iglesias points out that the present parent programs "are a conglomerate of different approaches which differ in their goals, formats, and durations with little or no regard to the interaction of parent characteristics and programs."

So far, few programs seem to have produced much reliable knowledge about the special needs of very young parents, and the interventions that both create long-lasting bonds between such parents and their children's schooling and help the parents develop better coping and parenting skills.

What does seem clear, however, is that inner-city schools must go beyond traditional strategies that depend on parents' initiatives and see themselves as educators of families.

Search