5 Strategies for Powerful Relationships Between Families
I’ve come to believe that one of the biggest untapped resources in the effort for families and schools to work together to support student growth is facilitating relationships between families.
As a parent during the Covid-19 pandemic, I felt more connected to my child’s school community than ever. The leadership team held weekly virtual “town hall” meetings that kept us in the loop of school events and initiatives. I texted more often with my child’s teacher. I saw everything my child wrote or created each day, and if I just unplugged her earphones, I could even listen in on the class. And yet, while I found the increased communication from the school helpful, what really made my family feel an increased sense of belonging were the relationships we formed with other families through this challenging season.
Realizing we were somewhat of an oddity in our connectedness, I’ve come to believe that one of the biggest untapped resources in the effort for families and schools to work together to support student growth is facilitating relationships between families.
All too often, family engagement looks like sending home weekly announcements or meeting a few times a year for parent-teacher conferences. This communication is often one-way and does little to empower parents to help their students grow. I know I had many ideas about parent engagement as an educator that were radically shaken when I became a parent of a school-aged child. Unfortunately, at its best, family engagement typically looks like a lot of communication with individuals, and less of an effort to build community.
This is where we’ve missed out. Extending beyond our traditional ideas of school-family relationships, developing family-to-family relationships in a school holds great power to disrupt the status quo of how school has been experienced by our most marginalized families. “Family engagement is equity work at its core…we believe schools and systems will continue to struggle to enact equity efforts if their staff are disconnected from the communities they serve” (Mapp & Bergman, 2021). Working towards educational equity includes working to connect with and even build connections between the families and communities served by the school. Especially for families who are asked to engage across racial and class differences with a predominantly white, middle-class teaching force, finding a sense of belonging with other families in the school community can help increase engagement and belonging.
A sense of belonging should be one of the primary goals of family engagement. We know that a student’s sense of belonging at school is associated with increased participation, achievement in school, emotional engagement and student retention, especially for marginalized students (Pendergast et al., 2018, Goodenow & grady, 1993). But a sense of belonging doesn’t start and stop as a student enters and leaves a school building. How families and communities perceive a school impacts this belonging as well. Creating a sense of belonging at school involves fostering connectedness among the whole school community, including between families. (Rowe & Stewart 2009).
While I’ve heard significant discussions and work about sustaining the focus on student-teacher relationships and teacher-family relationships that has surfaced during the pandemic, I’ve seen little focus on accessing, building and sustaining family-to-family relationships within schools.
I’ll share two examples of the power of connections between families that have made positive impacts on children’s learning, including my own. First, just a few months before Covid-19 shut schools down, two other moms and I wondered how we might keep meeting weekly on Tuesdays after school to let our kindergarteners play together as the weather got colder and the playground was no longer an option. The school, which serves predominantly African American and low-income families, didn’t offer science curriculum until 4th grade (despite protests from parents). We decided to start a parent-led science club. Each week, between 5 - 15 families and their students gather for snacks and science experiments. A love for science grew, as did the connection between parents. The active parents in the science club became the most active members of the PTA and other school events.
Second, born out of the families involved in science club, I engaged in a parent group text with 13 other families from my daughter’s school throughout the course of the pandemic. This was an invaluable resource. When the pandemic first closed schools (which we thought would be a week!), everyone shared resources they were using to keep kids engaged at home. Out of what was shared, my kindergartener began to learn the basics of coding and playing the piano, which certainly weren’t a part of her typical curriculum. We shared free events, free books, and free furniture with each other. When school communication was confusing, we turned to each other with questions like, “Is Monday a day off?” or “Can kids wear costumes tomorrow?”, easing some of the stress parents felt towards the school.
In these examples, when parents were connected with one another, students were learning content they would not otherwise have access to or were learning in a much more positive environment. Relationships between families prioritize the importance of belonging and friendship, while also supporting engagement and success in school. As the relationships between parents grow, the school can leverage these networks to strengthen the school-parent relationships, creating an upward spiral of expanded parent engagement.
While some educators may question if parents are looking for this type of engagement, I hear from parents time and again that they want to be more connected with their child’s school and with other families. In a survey of over 11,000 high school parents, researcher Beth Simon found “Regardless of family background or school context, when high schools reach out to involve families, families respond with increased involvement” (Epstein et. al., 2002, p. 243). Parents, even high school parents, want to be more connected, even if that means challenging our commonly held perceptions that they’d rather not.
5 Strategies for Empowering Family-to-Family Relationships
How can schools go about building networks of parents to support everything from student belonging to engagement? Here’s a few practical ideas:
Empower a parent “networker”: Give “room parents” a mission to be the class networker, not just to manage supplies or volunteer with the class library. Since teachers have limited time to make parent contact, consider empowering a parent volunteer to make regular contact with other parents celebrating success or sharing helpful information.
Empower a parent action group: Just like Dads on Duty, a group of 40 dads at a high school in Louisiana who took turns volunteering to greet students in the morning and establish a positive learning environments in response to school violence, schools can empower a (or step aside for an already empowered) group of parents to impact instruction or culture (Hartman, 2021). To get something started, invite parents to a special event, such as a breakfast, and spend time listening to their ideas about how they could be involved. Tap into community, sports and religious networks that already exist in your school.
Parent directory: Allow parents to opt-in to share basic contact information (such as just an email address) through a directory system that allows parents to connect with one another.
Prioritize hospitality: At all school events where parents are present, given an opportunity for parents to introduce themselves to each other and talk and make sure someone at the school’s job is to make these connections. “Put hospitality first,” writes professor Yvette Latunde, “Hospitality creates an environment of safety and trust in which parents can become engaged in ways that are comfortable for them because they feel valued” (Latunde, 2017). Creating fun and social spaces for parents is a great way to build parent connections. Schools can host monthly parent cafes, class playdates, or engaging community service events.
Parent-led workshops: Empower parents to lead workshops for other parents in areas where they or their students have been successful in school. For example, in a language immersion school, parents who are fluent in the school language could facilitate half-hour, virtual workshops for other families in the school community to give them the basic tools for supporting literacy at home in the school language.
Leveraging the strengths of their families, schools can innovate countless other ways to empower parent relationships. Let’s work to shift our vision of family and community engagement from a series of one-way or individual relationships between parents and schools, to one where we foster a rich network of families and communities, especially in their connection to one another.
Goodenow, Carol, and Kathleen Grady. “The relationship of school belonging and friends' values to academic motivation among urban adolescent students.” Journal of Experimental Education, vol. 62, no. 1, 1993.
Hartman, Steve. “Dads spend time in Louisiana high school after 23 students were arrested in string of violence.” CBS News, 22 October 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dads-louisiana-high-school-student-violence/.
Latunde, Yvette. “Welcoming Black Families: What Schools Can Learn from Churches.” Educational Leadership, vol. 75, no. 1, 2017.
Mapp, Karen L., and Eyal Burgman. “Embracing a New Normal: Toward a More Liberatory Approach to Family Engagement.” Carnegie Corporation of New York, June 2021, https://media.carnegie.org/filer_public/f6/04/f604e672-1d4b-4dc3-903d-3b619a00cd01/fe_report_fin.pdf.
Pendergast, Donna, et al. “Engaging Marginalized, “At-Risk” Middle-Level Students: A Focus on the Importance of a Sense of Belonging at School.” Education Sciences, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018.
“Predictors and Effects of Family Involvement in High School.” School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, by Joyce L. Epstein, et al., SAGE Publications, 2002.
Rowe, Fiona, and Donald Stewart. “Promoting connectedness through whole‐school approaches: a qualitative study.” Health Education, vol. 109, no. 5, 2009.