Supporting Family Engagement

Last Reviewed Date
January 11, 2023

The Preschool Development Grant Birth through 5 has several goals: maximizing family and parental choice, knowledge of, and engagement with existing programs in the state's mixed delivery system, which helps ease family access to all services. It also works to enhance school readiness for children from low-income and disadvantaged families, effectiely transitioning children into elementary school. States have met these goals by strengthening parent and family leaders through parent advisory councils, examining policies to promote programs and engagement for linguistically diverse families, and creating learning opportunities through parent cafés. This page showcases resources from the National Center on Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five related to strengthening family engagement within early childhood care and education services. 

Across the Rainbow: Strategies for Engaging Families

This discussion with state panelists is an introduction to several strategies used to encourage family and caregiver participation in the mixed delivery system.

PDG B-5 TA Center 2020 Annual Meeting - Meaningful Family Engagement Strand Opening Session

Presenters discuss how including family voices in early childhood programs can advance equity and improve outcomes in early childhood education.

Strategies for Collecting and Providing Data on a Mixed Delivery System to Support Family Choice

This brief describes how states can provide and use data to ensure famileis have enough choices when selecting early card and education services.

Family and Provider/Teacher Relationship Quality Measures

This page is devoted to the Family and Provider/Teacher Relationship Quality project, describing the project and its measures.

Engaging Black and Latino Parents in Family Support Programs

This resource shared strategies for engaging Black and Latino families and includes potential barriers and recommendations for culturally relevant programs.

Parents on Raising and Educating Children Birth to College

This brief has recommendations and discussion questions for buildling family-school relationships that add value to children's learning from birth to college.

Strategies for Implementing the Head Start PFCE Framework

This resource shares strategies for making progress towards each of the family outcomes in the Head Start Parent Family Community Engagement (PFCE) Framework.

Family Partnerships and Culture

This resource shares ways to build partnerships with families and include children's cultural experiences, which are essential parts of plannng curricula.

Creating Partnerships to Improve Child and Family Outcomes

This series helps early education and early childhood special education leaders build capacity for partnerships between personnel and family members.

Family Outreach Series

Four research-to-practice briefs with approaches for outreach to families experiencing homelessness, living in rural areas, and with limited English proficiency.

Family Voices: Driving Quality Child Care Choices

This report shares strategies for reaching and engaging families and summarizes effective consumer education materials and promising outreach practices.

Designing Family-Friendly Consumer Education on Child Care

This brief helps state agency staff design and implement consumer education websites and other resources, such as quality rating and improvement systems.

State and Territory Child Care Consumer Education Websites: Self-Assessment Checklist

This assessment tool helps states determine if their consumer education websites meet CCDF standards and best practices for user-friendly website design.

Consumer Education Resource Guides

These guides include resources on consumer education our outreach, focusing on ways to develop websites, optimize search engine results, and use social media.

 

Supporting Family Leaders

This video series shares strategies, practices, and approaches for effecitively preparing and supporting family leaders to engage in advocacy and decisionmaking.

Indiana Early Childhood Family Engagement Toolkit

This resource includes a roadmap for program improvement, indicators of family engagement, and a framework for family engagement that sets common goals.

Parent, Family, and Community Engagement Framework

This Head Start tool is for strategic planning, program design and management, continuous learning, and improvement activities related to family engagement.

Elevating QRIS Communications

This resource provides a framework for communicating about QRIS and setting measurable goals for increasing consumer awareness and provider participation.

Key Indicators of High-Quality Family Engagement for Quality Rating Improvement Systems

This brief helps quality rating and improvement systems professionals review key indicators that lead to family engagement in early childhood care settings.

What Quality Early Childhood Programs Look Like

Start Early's video series helps families identify quality programs by watching skilled early childhood teachers model positive interactions with children.

DREME Family Math Activities

This page provides activities that help parents support their children's early math skills at home, focusing on cooking, daily routines, games, and reading.

Talk, Read, and Sing Together Every Day!

These tip sheets help support young children's development by offering ways adults can offer positive, language-rich experiences for young children.