By Maren Madalyn, contributing writer
Voice is central to building relationships with families in early childhood education. Each family you serve in your Head Start or early learning program offers unique insights that can help not only guide their child’s growth, but also steer your broader programming.
However, it’s not always easy to build rapport with families and invite their voices to the table. Some caregivers may feel vulnerable about stepping forward to share their perspectives. Others may actively resist it. The result can sometimes be that a handful of family members become the loudest or most active voices informing a program’s strategy.
How can early childhood educators lay the foundation for every parent and caregiver to offer their insights for everyone’s benefit? What does strong partnership and communication with families look like?
Let’s explore the best family engagement strategies to uplift the diverse voices of the communities you serve, as well as the research behind early childhood and Head Start family engagement.
5 ways to weave family voice into your Head Start programming
1. Start with building trust with caregivers
As with all strong relationships, trust forms the base layer upon which everything else builds. When two people trust each other, they are better positioned to share information, even hard feedback, and engage together in problem-solving. In early childhood settings, the family-educator relationship can make a positive impact on a student’s learning, especially when a child faces challenges or needs extra support.
Trust-building is an ongoing process impacted by everything from a program’s communication strategy to informal, positive interactions to the learning environment itself. Establishing a baseline of trust is crucial to bringing families’ voices into your decision making and to drive positive outcomes for children.
Here are a few ways you can deepen the trust between your families and your program team:
- Consider a family’s first impression of your program. The earliest opportunities to cultivate trusting relationships with families start the moment they connect with your Head Start or early childhood program. A warm first impression can set the tone for the rest of the year—and the rest of their child’s schooling. After all, early childhood programs are often a parents first engagement with formal education. It’s important to signal that families are welcome and that their voices matter! You can start with examining your learning spaces. How do they feel as you walk through them? Do they reflect the diversity found in your family community? Are materials for families and students available in multiple home languages? Embracing culturally responsive family engagement helps create that great first impression.
- Practice active listening. This is one of the most effective communication skills for building trust. Not only can active listening improve the quality of collaboration between two people, it also improves the learning climate within a program, even in increasingly polarized environments. Read one teacher’s reflections on the power of active listening for ideas and practical strategies to cultivate relationships with parents.
2. Embrace a strengths-based approach to family engagement
Consider this statement: “Every caregiver wants to see their child thrive.”
This assertion is the foundation of a strengths-based approach to family-educator partnerships—a means of interacting with families by focusing on their existing assets and abilities rather than any deficits or gaps.
Though simple, this mindset shift is powerful.. Helping families recognize that their lived experiences, skills, and resources are able to (or often already are) create positive outcomes for their children is empowering and boosts their confidence! This deepens the trust between a family and early childhood professionals, which can open doors to two-way sharing and collaboration in the future.
Here are a few ways you can encourage your Head Start team to adopt strengths-based engagement strategies to build healthy relationships with their families.
- Ask families about strategies that support their child, as well as their hopes and dreams. While educators hold expertise in child development and learning, families hold insights about their little ones. The start of a program year is a great first opportunity for early childhood professionals to learn all about what works well at home to calm a distressed student or what most engages their curiosity. Taking time to understand what parents want most for their child’s future gives educators clues about what their families value. This information helps teachers then connect the dots between all the learning happening in the classroom (and at home!) and a family’s goals.
- Offer strengths-based family learning activities that a caregiver can do anytime, anywhere. For example, a school readiness activity focused on early reading skills might invite a parent to practice naming words that start with the letter “p” during the child’s bedtime routine. Evidence-based programs like ParentPowered are designed to fit into a family’s daily activities with ease, and don’t require extra time or resources to help their child build key reading, math, or social-emotional skills.
3. Create easy, equitable opportunities to connect with ALL families
A core piece to family engagement in early childhood education is communication. This includes both how a program reaches out to families (and how they share information) as well as the channels available for caregivers to connect with programs.
In an ideal world, your program would be able to reach every family member your team serves. But the reality of family communication is more complex.
Caregivers often juggle a lot of responsibilities day-to-day, leaving them little time to read lengthy emails or join in-person meetings with educators. Additionally, families may face barriers such as inconsistent access to the internet or reliable transportation that might be necessary to participate in certain family engagement activities, such as parent-teacher conferences.
As your program reflects on its communication strategies, consider these ideas for creating more equitable touchpoints that support family involvement:
- Craft communications with brand-new families in mind. Consider how your program sends its welcome messages to all of its families. Are there references to specific processes, locations, acronyms, etc. that may not be immediately recognizable to a parent new to the program? What additional, clarifying information would help a new family understand what is expected in terms of attendance, mealtimes, and more? To help avoid making assumptions about families’ understanding of education systems, some programs create handbooks to welcome the newest additions to their community (and refresh the memories of returning families). Remember, a great first impression can impact a family’s experience with the entire school system!
- Text messaging is most effective. In the modern age, text messaging is one of the most ubiquitous and equitable technologies available. Most families have cell phones, regardless of their living circumstance or socioeconomic background. Of cellphone users, 97% of them send and receive text messages (Pew Research, 2024; Pew Research, 2015). Conversely, internet access may not always be consistent for every caregiver. By sending key information to parents through texts instead of apps or emails, programs have a much higher likelihood of reaching every caregiver.
4. Integrate family voice into continuous improvement practices
Every Head Start program conducts its family needs assessment at the start and end of each program year. These data are essential for designing programming around those areas that would most benefit families, from parenting essentials to at-home literacy strategies. Solutions like the National Head Start Association’s Parent Gauge are excellent tools for gathering, synthesizing, and evaluating this information.
And—programming for families is all the more impactful when Head Start teams adopt continuous improvement strategies, iterating in small ways on their offerings in response to families’ evolving needs throughout the year.
Consider sending short, targeted, multilingual surveys to families (via text message programs like ParentPowered!) to get quick feedback about a parenting workshop series you’re conducting or to check in about how easy parents find take-home learning activities. Your team can review these data during monthly or quarterly meetings to determine if any changes may be needed to the next wave of programming on schedule. This input can inform professional development opportunities for teaching staff, too.
Asking for caregivers’ input helps build their confidence in your program, which in turn contributes to strong relationships with parents and educators. It’s well worth investing in these lines of communication!
ParentPowered is proud to partner with the National Head Start Association (NHSA)! Our programs and Parent Gauge work together to provide Head Start teams the insights they need to both establish their program’s baseline goals around family engagement and iterate on them throughout the year. Learn how to use these tools together and guide your team in building positive relationships that nurture children’s school readiness.
5. Close the feedback loops
As families share their feedback, it’s important to close that feedback loop, returning to your community with information about how and where this input influenced programming.
This step can be as simple as pointing to specific family inputs when announcing any changes or new additions to your programming. For example, if your families expressed a strong desire for more support with their emotional wellbeing in a recent survey, be sure to highlight this input when introducing opportunities for families to receive these services, such as a new community partnership with a mental health organization.
For many families, just hearing how your program used their input can help them feel like they are an important part of your program.
Insights on building relationships with families in early childhood education
As young learners approach kindergarten, it becomes all the more important that they develop foundational skills physically, mentally, and emotionally that prepare them for a classroom environment. Research studies have shown that, when children are kindergarten-ready:
- They experience higher achievement later in their schooling, including better performance in English language arts and mathematics by grade 3 (La Paro & Pianta, 2000; Justice et al., 2019; Chetty et al., 2011).
- When supported by Early Head Start or a similar early learning program, children display greater social and emotional development, as well as cognitive and language development (Love et al., 2005).
- They are more likely to graduate high school on time (Clarity Social Research Group’s longitudinal study of student outcomes in San Francisco Unified School District).
Of course, Head Start and other early learning programs provide just the right support and teaching to help children build these skills!
As an educator or leader in a Head Start program, you also know how crucial families are to children’s development during these early years. After all, caregivers and parents are a child’s very first teachers, showing them how to navigate in the world before a child ever steps foot in their first classroom.
Families offer much more than active engagement with their child’s development. Caregivers’ funds of knowledge—their lived experiences and cultural knowledge—offer educators invaluable insights that can help your Head Start program achieve its mission and vision for learning.
This is why weaving family voices into your planning and continuous improvement processes is important. A valuable resource that helps programs with building relationships with families in early childhood education is the research-based Parent, Family, and Community Engagement framework, developed by the Head Start Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center (ECLKC).
Family voice underpins the entire framework—yes, even those elements focused more on educators, such as professional development!
Take Program Leadership under the Program Foundations section, for instance. The ECLKC explains that, within this realm, “Leaders advocate for the inclusion of diverse family voices at all levels of the program, including in formal decision-making groups, such as parent committees and Policy Councils.” Complimentary to this recommendation, the Community Partnerships section encourages Head Start programs to “connect families to outside resources, encourage engagement in children’s learning, and use community strengths and needs assessment data to guide collaboration.”
By building trust, opening doors for two-way communication, and integrating family input into strategic decisions and planning, Head Start programs deepen their impact and improve both child and family outcomes.
Partner with ParentPowered and NHSA to nurture collaboration with families
Building relationships with families in early childhood education isn’t always easy. But the right partners and the right tools can help clarify the path forward and set Head Start teams up for success.
That’s why ParentPowered and the National Head Start Association teamed up to offer our solutions together, maximizing the potential for every Head Start program to positively improve children’s learning and families’ wellbeing. Watch our on-demand webinar to learn more about how our solutions can support your team to cultivate positive relationships with families!
About the author
Maren Madalyn has worked at the intersection of K12 education and technology for over a decade, serving in roles ranging from counseling to customer success to product management. She blends this expertise with fluid writing and strategic problem-solving to help education organizations create thoughtful long-form content that empowers educators.
