Parents Make the Difference
Children and youth, whose parents actively support learning at home, do better in many ways. They get better grades, have higher graduation rates, and are more likely to go to college, said an American educationist.
Delivering the keynote speech at the Supreme Education Council’s (SEC) annual symposium on “Parents: Partners in Education”, Dr Heather Weiss said: “You need great schools and hardworking teachers. But you also need strong parental involvement for the best academic performance of children.”
The children are hardly spending 18 percent of their whole day in the schools. Rest of the time is being spent with the parents and family members. This underpins the need for parents’ active involvement in their educational affairs, she said.
“All parents must know what is important for their children and they must develop the skill to support their children. On the other hand, the education supporters must also reach out to the parents,” she said.
Dr Weiss, founder and director of Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP), said parent involvement is a major component of American education reform efforts.
“The US research on parent involvement suggests that there are three particularly important aspects of parent involvement for children’s development and academic success. The first aspect is parenting – the attitudes, values, and interactions about learning that parents demonstrate as they raise their children. The second is parent involvement in home-school relationships – the formal and informal connections, communications, and partnerships with the child’s school and teachers. The third aspect is a sense of shard responsibility for learning outcomes-parents as well as the school take responsibility for the child’s learning and education“, she said.
On the early learning, Dr Weiss said, children’s vocabularies increases rapidly, and they acquire the ability to remember experiences, sustain attention, count and recognize letters. Through interactions with adults and peers, they develop self-concepts and self-esteem, improve emotional self-regulation. In this stage of a child’s life, nurturing, warm and responsive parent-child relationships and parental participation in child-centered activities.
Children of parents, who stimulate their kids through books, reading and talking with their children, and direct teaching activities, are more likely to be ready for school. For instance, mothers who use more complex sentences and a wider range of different words in their everyday life conversations have children with richer expressive language and higher scores on literacy-related tasks in kindergarten.
Children who live in a stimulating home environment with books and educational materials, parent-child discussions and other learning experiences develop curiosity and stronger academic skills, and demonstrate higher achievement. When parents limit television watching, children have better academic outcomes, she said.
Significantly, parent involvement in the middle and high school education shows that involvement tends to decrease due to teenagers’ desire for self-reliance and less outreach for parent involvement from schools. (…)
Source: Peninsula On-line, Qatar
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