Collaborating with Parents in Early Childhood Care and Education

This article summarizes the reports from the Special Event "Collaborating with Parents in Early Childhood Care and Education" at the UNESCO I World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education, including Power Point presentations. The event seeks to promote global exchange of good practices in parents collaborating in ECCE. it deals with the experience of parenting education and psychological counseling in the UK and Russia.

Summary from the Special Event "Collaborating with Parents in Early Childhood Care and Education" at the UNESCO I World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education.

Parents are the first educators and caregivers of young children. This Special Event addresses the important role of parents in ensuring the well-being, development and education of young children, and explores effective ways of providing psychological and material support for enhancing their children’s early socialisation and adaptation to ECCE programmes, such as kindergartens, through the establishment of advisory centres and internet, etc. The event seeks to promote global exchange of good practices in parents collaborating in ECCE

Maria M. Tsapenko opened the Event with the description of ongoing changes in Russian preschool education. Recently the contradictions between traditional activities of preschool facilities and their collaboration with parents. Support and development of parental competence at the each stage of a child’s and family development have become the new goals. “Work with parents” has evolved into “collaboration with parents”. It’s not only about changing the wording – the educators learn to treat parents as equal partners, not like “objects” of their “educational work”.

Different types of preschool care and education are developing in Moscow, at the moment there are:

• 368 counseling facilities for parents whose children do not attend kindergarden,
• 125 Lekoteks for children with special needs,
• 394 family (home) kindergardens established by parents having many children
• And 2040 state kindergardens, typical for Russia. 

Mary Crowley stated that parenting education is a vital contribution into early childhood care and education. “Bad” parenting affects not only the children but the society as a whole. 80% of adult criminals were “problem” children some time ago. The main risks for children from birth to age 5 – lack of care and nurturing and / or inadequately severe discipline.

Mary Crowley also discussed many topical practical issues in work with parents. This includes the aims of work with expectant parents – they should be prepared to bringing up their infant, not just form giving birth. She shared her experience in involving fathers in parenting education – there are special programs for them in the UK that are run straight at the workplace. One of the most significant fathering programs operates at the London Underground.

Natalya N. Avdeeva generalized the experience of work of parenting consultation at the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. She pointed out some typical problems in development of parenting competences: lack of knowledge of peculiarities of child development at different ages, understanding age and personality features of a child as “naughty behaviour” and misunderstanding of “unconditioned acceptance” principle that leads to “liberal” upbringing. At the same time there are many positive trends: parents are motivated for creating optimal environment for children’s development, they actively search for appropriate information. More and more young fathers actually take part in upbringing children from the very birth. Many parents regard parent-child relationships as the source of their own personal growth.

Marina A. Egorova presented “PsyParents.ru - Child Psychology for Parents” web-portal. It provides access to articles, books (reviewed by the project counselors) and the other popular psychological materials. On-line consultations are available via e-mail, personal space at the portal or Skype. These consultations are carried out according to the ethical and legal norms of on-line counseling. Signing up for a consultation via internet, parents have to indicate the problem, so they think it over and write something more concrete than just “(s)he misbehaves!”. Another important branch of the portal is “University for parents” – video lectures, readers, self-assessment questions on different topical issues in child development.