Founder Welcome
Message from Dr. Lynn McDonald
We all share the commitment that our nation's children succeed to the best of their capability at home, at school, and in the community. There are a variety of prevention and early intervention approaches available today for achieving this very important goal. How do you know which one to choose? Let me share my perspectives on why it makes sense to work with Families and Schools Together.
What really works in this field to help young children succeed over time is their relationships with parents, peers, and schools. Longitudinal research is clear: if children have people to whom they can turn for advice and permission, to talk about their uncertainties and stresses over their lifetime, those children can beat the odds of adversity in life. Therefore, I always evaluate a prevention/early intervention program by asking two questions:
One: Does it strengthen important relationships and bonds between human beings?
Two: Are the relationships that it builds lifelong and applicable to those that should be naturally occurring in the child's social context?
The important questions to ask when assessing school-based programs are: do they respect parents? and do they enhance and widen long-term circles of support for the child?
Our programs deliberately build up the relationships with the whole family by conducting outreach to the home, including parent education, home visits or in-home family therapy to enhance family relationships and create an empowerment structure. Our programs enhance the parent's ability to be tuned in to the child's development, to be consistent in parenting, and to communicate within the family; these parent skills, in turn, strengthen the resilience of the child. But we do not believe such activities are sufficient. In fact, if the services your community provides stopped with outreach approaches, you run the risk of further isolating the family and creating dependency on the service provider's assertiveness. High stress and social isolation are the biggest predictors of child abuse and neglect. This is why our approach is to create a forum for parents and community resources to collaborate and understand one another. Our family social networking strategy makes the difference between success and failure of the entire program. We look forward to working with you and helping your community provide outstanding results.
What I have finally learned from working in the field over the 30 years is this:
- Building long-term relationship in the child's world will matter the most to the child's success.
- Popular and commonly accepted early intervention and prevention programs that attempt to teach skills without building connecting kids, parents, and service providers will not change the lives of the children.
- If programs build strong relationships between a child and a counselor, a child and a volunteer, and a child and a mentor, i.e., someone especially brought in for this process, there are risks because these relationships are rarely lifelong relationships. What usually happens is that the "caring" adult moves on to something else over time. The loser in this process is the child who has put trust into this "relationship" with a well- meaning adult only to have to say goodbye forever to that person after a semester, a grade, or a year or two, for reasons that are not related to the child's needs or life. These programs can be confusing for a child's trust and can support notions of "transient friendships."
- If the early intervention programs are respectful of the parents, and build long-term relationships in naturally occurring environmental contexts, for example with a church leader, a teacher, a neighbor, an aunt or uncle, they will enormously enhance the child's life.
- Unfortunately, some programs are modeled so as to create direct "friendship-with-the-child". These programs are in competition with the parents and move the child away from trusting or admiring his or her own parents. These programs, especially if used in compulsory education create friction between parents and schools. They inadvertently undermine the relationship of the child with his or her own parent, by suggesting that the parent is somehow inadequate and failing the child. For example many programs come off trying to be "smarter," more stimulating, more generous with incentives, and more fun in the eyes of the child. However, if the same conduct is done in through the parent, in respect for parental authority, the child will thrive with multiple sources of input. Parents want help, but they do not want to concede parenting to an institution.