By Ben York, Ph.D, Founder & CEO of ParentPowered PBC
Greetings fellow early educators. I hope this inaugural blog post finds you and your loved ones healthy and safe during these unusual times.
I’m writing to share some exciting news.
Since we started our journey in 2016, our team at ParentPowered has focused on breaking down the complexity of engaged parenting and caregiving into bite-sized pieces of digestible, actionable information for families . Each week, we send text messages to parents and caregivers with fun fact, easy tips, and and encouraging messages on how to promote whole child development by building on existing family routines — like pointing out letters on a shampoo bottle during bath time, counting the number of forks as you put them away, and making feeling faces in the mirror after you brush your teeth.. We call these everyday learning moments and they’ve been scientifically demonstrated to increase children’s learning.
While we’re very proud of the work we’ve done to date, we also want to share with you – our community of early education leaders – the “how” and “why” behind the program you see, as well as what we’re learning from partners across the country.
That’s why we’re excited to be launching the Everyday Learning Moments blog: to give you more insight into questions we’re constantly exploring and what we’re hearing from the field. Topics will include:
- What do our partners most need their parents to know to help their children succeed?
- Is there any new research or information from the field that we should incorporate into our curricula?
- What kinds of data are early childhood educators focused on right now?
- Are there new techniques we can leverage for sharing your news with your families?
- What are our partners doing that others could learn from?
We begin our blog with a story that we’re particularly proud to share right now as COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting our most vulnerable families: our journey to creating ParentPowered Trauma-Informed.
We look forward to sharing lots of behind-the-scenes information with you, and learning from you so we can pass along your insights to our community, too. We hope you find this information useful, we’d love your feedback, and as always, thank you for all that you do to support families and children.
As Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
With warmest regards,
Ben York, Ph.D
Founder & CEO, ParentPowered PBC
