Supporting Family Engagement
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.
Family Engagement Resources
The following resources provide strategies for meaningful family engagement.
How State Leaders Can Promote Meaningful Family Engagement at the State and Program Level
This webinar discusses Out of School Time, the need for child care during the pandemic, and how to support child care both during and after the pandemic.
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.
Additional Resources
The following resources provide additional information about family engagement.
Consumer Engagement: Foundations for Engaging Families
This guidebook helps early childhood and school-age education professionals at the systems or program levels engage parents as consumers in plans and programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.