Know

Welcoming Each School-Age Child and Family

Where do you feel welcomed? What happens in a place that makes you feel welcome?

Spend a few seconds thinking about the two questions above. Then consider all the things you do in your daily work to make school-age children and their families feel welcome in your program. How do you greet children and families when they arrive and when it is time to go home? How do you ensure that school-age children and youth feel welcome, learn, and develop while having fun? How do you interact with them when they seem upset? How do you ensure that families feel welcome and supported?

Successful school-age staff members create positive, welcoming environments for the children and families they work with and strive for excellence in their interactions with others. The most important aspects of your work are the relationships you create and nurture with children, families, and colleagues. Relationships form over time and require ongoing effort and commitment. Collaborating with others is a big part of your work, and whether you are a brand new or a seasoned staff member, your success and effectiveness hugely depend on how well you work with others. Whether you are engaging with school-age children, families, colleagues, or supervisors, nurturing these relationships early on is critical to your success.

School-age children and youth are constantly learning and changing. When families and staff members work together, communicate, and share what is observed and experienced, opportunities are created for better understanding and supporting this rapid developmental growth. Asking questions, communicating, and listening with families helps support continuity of care between home and the school-age program.

Understanding children and child development is absolutely essential in your role as a school-age staff member. The individual courses within the Virtual Lab School provide extensive information on each of the developmental domains (e.g., Cognitive Development, Physical Development, Social & Emotional Development) as well as strategies and practical ideas on how to promote optimum growth. You should refer to these courses for comprehensive information about school-age children’s development. Along with school-age children’s development, knowledge about topics such as safe environments, learning environments, healthy environments, positive guidance, child abuse, and family engagement will strengthen your competence and enable you to positively impact the lives of children and families. Optimum development is achieved when children in your care are healthy, emotionally secure, and socially connected. This development, however, cannot be achieved unless you put school-age children’s families at the forefront of your work.

When engaging with families of school-age children with special learning needs, you should work with your T&CSs and Program Managers to ensure that you have the resources and supports you need. You should work collaboratively with T&CSs, Program Managers, and family members to be sure that a school-age child’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) outcomes are addressed (if appropriate) in your program. Successful inclusion of children with disabilities requires careful planning and ongoing communication among all team members. Building collaborative relationships takes time and attention but has meaningful outcomes on your practice.

You will work with your T&CS and Program Manager to ensure that families are welcomed and supported at all times in your program. Just as you care about how school-age children and youth are welcomed, you have to pay attention to how families are included in your daily work, not only at drop-off and pick-up time, but throughout their child’s time with you. In doing so, consider the following:

• Ask family members how they want to be involved and remind them that they are important to you.
• Respect each school-age child in your care and their families and acknowledge diversity and individual differences in growth, backgrounds, values, and beliefs.
• Share information with families about the work you do with school-age children in your care and, if needed, explain why you do things a certain way.
• Families can choose to be involved in various ways. For military families, it is critical to have flexibility in how they can participate.
• When families volunteer in your program, they need to have clear directions and a purpose and to know what the expectations are for them.
• Family members want to have meaningful conversations about their child. Make sure you keep them updated about their child's growth regularly. Acknowledge all the great things school-age children do on a daily basis and share those with their families often! Ongoing communication and collaboration benefits everyone.
• All families have strengths and all families have challenges. Focus on each family's strengths and build on those.

Introducing Family-Centered Practice

Because families are central to their child’s development, they are partners, active participants, and decision-makers in their children’s education process. As a result, family-centered practice is considered one of the indicators of quality in early childhood education, school-age programs, and services. At the heart of family-centered practice is the belief that families are the most important decision-makers in a child’s life.

Family-centered practice also means that you understand the important effect all family members have on each other and on the school-age child. Each family member affects the other and the ways that the family functions. All family members are interconnected. From our families, we learn skills that enable us to engage in school and the workplace.

When considering family-centered practice, you are viewing school-age children and youth as part of a larger system; you are viewing family members as a whole. You become aware of and sensitive to the interactions and relationships taking place within the family, as well as outside interactions and supports that affect them. In an effort to maintain relationships and to work effectively together, you learn, respect and understand characteristics of each family and its support system. You can also consider the characteristics and stressors that may affect a family’s involvement. What affects one family member can affect all family members. A family is a complex system in which no one member can be viewed in isolation.

Family-centered practice is an umbrella term that encompasses the beliefs and actions of people in your program. Consider this table:

Making an effort to understand school-age children and their families can create opportunities for you to better support the children in your care.

Being a responsive school-age staff member means that you demonstrate sensitivity and consideration for the multiple backgrounds, experiences, values, and contexts in which children and families live.

Being a responsive school-age staff member also means that you are always professional and ethical when working with families. In doing that, you should practice the following:

• Keep information about children and their families confidential. This refers to reviewing child and family records, having conversations with other staff members in your program or in the community, or engaging in conversations with other people you know in the community.
• When you know confidential information about a child or family, use that information to help them and not judge them.
• If individuals ask you for confidential information about school-age children or families in your program, refer them to your T&CS or Program Manager.

See

Do

There is a lot you can do to show that you value the families of school-age children in your program. Consider the following guidelines that reflect family-centered practice, and then think about how you can use these guidelines in your work with children and families.

• Recognize the family as the constant in the child's life and that school-age staff members and service systems may come and go.
• Acknowledge that families know their children best and learn to view them as partners and collaborators in your work. Reach out to them and invite their input.
• Facilitate collaboration between families and professionals.
• Encourage family-to-family support and networking.
• Recognize and value the unique differences that each family brings to your program. You may do this by:
  • Demonstrating genuine interest in each child and family you work with and making an effort to get to know them.
  • Having family information and children's books in the languages of each family.
  • Inviting families to visit your program to share their family background and traditions or prepare a traditional snack or meal with the children.
  • Observing how a family interacts with their school-age child.
  • Meeting regularly with families to learn about their hopes, dreams and goals for their child.