By Rebecca Honig, chief content & curriculum officer; edited by Maren Madalyn
Parenting has a distinct lack of scaffolding.
I remember the shock I felt three days after giving birth to my first child when the nurse came in and happily announced, “You get to go home today.”
I was like, “Wait… what… you’re just going to let me walk out of here with this child? You DO know I’ve never done this before, right?” I asked if there was some sort of training video or abbreviated course I could take before I left. A manual maybe, like the ones they give you at IKEA when you purchase a new table?
I felt sweaty and desperate. “I know you need to free up this room so other babies can get delivered in here but how about I just move into that closet down the hall where they keep the johnnies? I’ll just set myself up in there. Just in case I have a quick question or need another swaddling demo… No?”
And even now, many years and several kids later, I still have those desperate moments, at least once a week. Sometimes once an hour. Moments where I could REALLY use some scaffolding and guidance for good parenting.
But scaffolding isn’t just for parenting itself. When children enter learning environments, whether it’s a Head Start program, a preschool, elementary school, etc, it can feel overwhelming for a family to figure out the exact structure they now must operate within and how to best support their children. And even with all the encouragement and opportunities laid out in front of families, you as an educator may still not see the engagement you hoped for.
In BOTH of these situations, parental scaffolding is critical and doable.
Educators are scaffolding pros
The term “scaffolding” simply refers to an approach to learning that involves teaching a child just beyond the level of what they know or could learn on their own.
In education, this isn’t anything new! We rely on scaffolding when our teaching practices all the time. It helps children learn new things and stretch beyond what they can already do by introducing new ideas. Just like the scaffold that gets temporarily erected at a construction site, it provides a light framework of support that helps kids reach new heights — heights they might not be able to reach all on their own.
In education, scaffolding can take the form of modeling. It can mean breaking a task into smaller steps so it becomes more doable. Scaffolding can also mean adding visual aids, peer support, props, real-life examples, and manipulatives to activities to help a child develop new skills.
Scaffolding makes total sense. When learning something new, who wouldn’t benefit from support?
But try Googling “scaffolding for parents” or “parental scaffolding” or “I’m a really overwhelmed parent, can someone please scaffold this experience for me?” You will come up empty.
To repeat: parenting has a distinct lack of scaffolding!
“I believe I am raising my kids in a much better way than my parents raised me since I am so easily connected to a parenting knowledge reservoir.”
ParentPowered Caregiver
The good news is that schools, districts, and early learning programs have an opportunity to bring scaffolding into their family engagement strategies. We can help caregivers both develop effective parenting styles that nurture their child’s growth while also offering them entry points to collaborate with schools to boost children’s learning.
The invisible foundations of parental scaffolding
I recently joined Ilana Steinhauer, Executive Director of Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires, to unpack how to set educators up to successfully scaffold parenting. During the webinar, we explored several critical foundations necessary for scaffolding to be effective:
- Trusting relationships: Above all else, building trust with families is THE ground work to scaffolding. Trust can be cultivated in small but powerful ways, across people, places, and resources shared with families. For example, active listening during a conversation with a parent can help them feel welcome and that they are safe to express themselves at a school.
- Access to basic needs: the next essential foundation focuses on meeting families’ needs. These can include healthcare, safety, housing, food security, and much more. Each community of parents will have unique needs that, once supported, give them greater capacity to become self reliant and support their children’s growth.
- Language support and technology: These foundations add strength to the first two. Providing materials and resources in families’ home languages works wonders to increase their sense of belonging in a school community. Technology tools like text messaging can help ensure that ALL families receive information and supports regardless of access to internet or other resources. (This is why ParentPowered’s family engagement curriculum is delivered via text messages, not through any apps to download or that need internet connectivity!)
Ultimately, scaffolding parent and family engagement with their child’s growth and development is all about building parents’ self efficacy. As schools become more collaborative with their family communities, they have opportunity to help caregivers step into leadership roles, co-creating learning experiences with educators for the good of all children. That’s the power of scaffolding!
So how do we scaffold parenting?
Just as children gain from intentional supports that encourage them to grow just beyond their current capabilities, families also benefit from guidance that incrementally builds upon their parenting and engagement skills.
Below are just a few ways that you can begin to leverage the “scaffold effect” in your parent engagement strategies. Watch the on-demand webinar for more details, resources, and starting prompts to build on these suggestions!
1. Provide clear expectations and information – always!
In the classroom, a teacher builds skills in a very specific order, ensuring kids have all the prerequisite skills to learn the new things you want them to learn. With family engagement, this means starting with basic expectations and guidance for how families can navigate the complex system that is school.
For example, consider how your organization sends its back-to-school messages to families. What information is included about things like drop-off times and locations, bus routes, what kids should bring with them, how parents can get questions answered, etc.? Is this information available in all home languages, or do you offer translators to assist caregivers?
You can also apply this reflective exercise to any learning resources you send home to families, asking yourself:
- Do parents and caregivers have all the necessary skills, information, and materials to do the thing I’m asking them to do?
- What supports can I add in to make this more accessible and doable for ALL my families?
- Is the language I’m using going to be clear and understandable to every family?
As providers of a digital family engagement platform, ParentPowered does everything we can to ensure that our messages are clear, understandable, and accessible for all caregivers. We write everything in 160 characters and at a 3rd-grade reading level. And we offer parenting support in multiple languages so all the information we give is easy to digest.
Use our Back To School Checklist to ensure you’re creating a welcoming and warm environment (applicable all year round)!
2. Tee up families’ access to community resources
You as an educator already know that, if a student is struggling with basic needs like food or safety, they cannot devote attention and energy towards learning. The same is true for families and their engagement with student learning. Understanding what basic needs a parent faces is essential to then addressing those challenges and raise a caregiver’s capacity for support to new heights. And schools can do so much to help a family reach these resources, rather than leaving them to their own devices.
Here are a few considerations as you explore connecting families to community resources either available through your organization or through partnerships:
- Become familiar with each resource available to families. The hope is that by connecting families with a particular organization, they are provided more support than they could previously access (and in turn experiences positive impacts on their lives). This means understanding the process by which a caregiver can apply for supports or connect with that community group, as well as eligibility requirements and any barriers that a family may face.
- Communicate this information with parents clearly. This goes back to the first tip and is a great way to set up a family for success in gaining community resource. Consider giving a parent the name of specific adults at an agency with whom you may be connected, providing a warm handoff even if you are not physically present. You can also outline all the elements a family needs to have ready before they apply for supports, such as a valid driver’s license or a bank account.
- Use families’ feedback to advocate further. Listening to your caregivers’ experiences and successes with a community organization can help the next parent seeking supports! You can use surveys or informal conversations to follow up with families about the resources they receive and take these lessons learned forward.
In ParentPowered Trauma-Informed we add in a whole secondary messaging stream linking parents to local support, people, and services they can get help from if they are struggling or just have questions. And we make sure those supports DON’T feel overwhelming.
Download and share our Reaching Out resource to support your families with making connections at community organizations.
3. Create ample listening opportunities to build trust
Speaking of parent input, it is always helpful for educators to listen to what caregivers have to say. These communication moments don’t necessarily require extensive time or resources. In fact, everyday moments throughout a school’s existing routines can cultivate listening!
For example, the front office is often one of the first places a caregiver experiences a school. In addition to creating a warm and welcoming environment — which reduces a caregiver’s sense of trust or anxiety — you can consider other ways to invite that adult to share their experiences and insights by asking yourself questions like:
- How does the front office staff greet a parent when they arrive? Are we using eye contact, open body language, a warm smile?
- Are we staying curious as parents express their needs, concerns, and questions? Can we listen from a mindset that assumes every family member wants their children to succeed?
- Are we checking for understanding by repeating what a caregiver shares, then following with “Did I get that right?”
By investing in even small changes to our behaviors and approaches to communicate with a parent, we make a big impact on their perception of school.
Better still, you can also tee up parents to practice skills like active listening at home, which boosts the parent-child relationship and self confidence over time. Our ParentPowered text messages often provide caregivers with encouraging tips and strategies for building their communication skills, offering example conversation starters and more.
Share our listening guides with your caregivers today to give them a leg up with their communication at home.
4. Practice, practice, practice!
Teaching a new skill, or applying an existing one in new ways, takes practice. As your organization develops its scaffolding for families, it helps to take the time to reflect and revise processes, determining what works and what doesn’t.
Here again, parental feedback (as well as the inputs of those staff members engaging with them like front desk staff and teachers) plays in important role to improve how to scaffold parent engagement. You can use programs like ParentPowered to easily text your community for quick input on particular programs or strategies used to support caregivers to engage in learning.
ParentPowered is designed to scaffold effective family engagement
As an educator, you and your team know how to scaffold for kids. It is even more powerful when you then make parental scaffolding a part of your organization’s culture of family engagement.
When we center scaffolding as part of every family’s experience, we enable caregivers to bring all their strengths and insights to their students’ learning, bolstering their confidence and self esteem. This builds a positive school climate and maximizes the opportunity for every child to thrive.
In each of our programs, ParentPowered takes numerous steps to ensure that parents and caregivers have this right amount of support on a regular basis. We’ve learned from scaffolding instruction in the classroom and applied essential strategies to provide parental support, bolstering family members as at-home learning partners.
Join an upcoming info session to discover which of our offerings best supports your goals with student growth and development.
About the author
Rebecca Honig is the Chief Content and Curriculum Officer at ParentPowered. She has authored numerous curricula, parent guides, and children’s storybooks for Sesame Workshop, Scholastic, Disney, Compass Learning, PBS, WGBH, HITN, Nickelodeon, Mo Willems, and The Norman Rockwell Museum. She has also served as a Curriculum and Content Specialist for Sesame Street and spent ten years teaching in public, private, and after school programs. Rebecca has a Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from Bank Street.
