families

Family Engagement

Learn family-centered practices that build relationships and support families.

Family members are the most important people in young children’s lives. This course will help you view families as a system, implement family-centered practice, and build positive relationships with families. You will learn appropriate ways to share and collect information with and from families. Supporting families of children with special needs, military families, and families facing other challenges will also be addressed.

Families: An Introduction

Family members are the most important people in children’s lives, and impact how children develop and learn. To effectively develop partnerships with families and to help create an environment that meets the needs of each child, it is important for caregivers to understand families as a system and the impact of parenting in early childhood. This lesson shares perspectives for understanding families and provides an introduction to family-centered practice.

Promoting Family Engagement

Strong family engagement is an integral part of high-quality home-based child care. Successful providers depend on the relationship and collaboration with the children’s families and communities. For this reason, it is crucial to establish positive relationships with children’s families and to include families in your home-based child care. Research indicates that family engagement is essential to child development and can lead to positive results in children’s school readiness. This lesson will help you identify ways to establish and maintain positive relationships with children’s families.

Promoting Family Engagement: Communicating With Families

Effective communication with families is a way to promote family engagement and create strong collaborative partnerships. When families and caregivers communicate and share what is observed and experienced, it creates opportunities to better understand and support the rapid developmental growth that happens with all children. This lesson will highlight appropriate ways to collect information from families, as well as the ways and opportunities to share information in a caring, easy-to-understand way.

Working With Families of Children With Special Needs

This lesson will highlight the ways in which you can play an important role in supporting families of children with special needs in your family child care home. You will learn recommendations for effective collaboration with families and other professionals and begin to understand the additional roles and responsibilities placed on many families of children with disabilities.

Strengthening and Supporting Military Families and Families Facing Challenges

Many times, families are faced with challenges that put them and their children at risk. Military families deal with specific circumstances that can affect their functioning and well-being. Providing support is one of the most important things we can do for families. This lesson will provide an introduction to the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework. You will learn about each factor, how you can provide support, and challenges you may face when working with children and their families. This lesson will also help you understand common situations military families face, such as frequent moves and deployment.