By Erin Schryer and Nicole Letourneau
In Canada, two out of five adults – that’s nearly nine million people – cannot read well enough to perform everyday tasks. Reading difficulties start early. It is very well established that children who are not reading well by the end of grade one are likely never to read well. Reduced literacy puts these children at a disadvantage for the rest of their schooling — and their life.
So what can be done?
Research from a cross-section of disciplines, including education, medicine, nursing and psychology suggest that parents are children’s first and most influential teachers. From temperament and personality, physical and mental health, to school achievement, literacy and more, the influence of parents and the environments in which children are raised is tremendous. As anyone with children can attest, the apple often does not fall far from the tree.
But are we harnessing parental influence in a meaningful and positive way where literacy is concerned? Are we empowering Canadian parents with the information and tools they need to ensure their enduring influence on literacy is the best that it can be?
In the early 1990s, the concept of family-centred care was introduced as a new healthcare paradigm for children by the Association for the Care of Children’s Health. The approach integrates patients and their families into treatment processes, recognizing that while family is constant, healthcare providers and systems change and fluctuate regularly. Fundamentally, the need to collaborate with families to ensure that they understand and support their child’s care plan, for the overall health of the child, is recognized and valued with this new approach.
According to many observers, family-centred care for children in the healthcare system has revolutionized how children are cared for, improved healthcare outcomes and reduced costs all at the same time.
A family-centred paradigm should be replicated in other social areas, including throughout Canadian education systems — and specifically in the area of literacy.
Parent involvement in early literacy has been linked to children’s eventual reading success as well as their overall academic achievement. Literacy programs that involve the family, often called, “family literacy” initiatives seek to empower parents by positioning them at the centre of children’s literacy education.
A key feature of family literacy initiatives is teaching parents about how children learn and suggesting specific methods or activities that parents can engage their children with at home to support their development. While many Canadian parents have low literacy, most have the skills required to meaningfully support their preschooler or early elementary reader by reading simple story books together every day, pointing out letters in books and in the environment, and singing nursery rhymes.
A particularly innovative family literacy program from Stanford University researchers called Ready4K! is an eight-month long text messaging intervention for parents of preschoolers. It provides parents with research-based information and highly specific activities for parents to do with their children to foster literacy development. It does this by sending instructional text messages to parents three times per week. The results so far are positive, translating into statistically significant learning gains among both parents and children.
And it’s scalable. This cannot be said for all family literacy programs, the majority of which are developed by schools or community organizations who then struggle to fund and sustain them.
We need a cultural shift among educators and schools that a family-centred approach is key to successful literacy. To support an integrated, ongoing involvement of families in children’s literacy education, three actions are required.
First, before children enter school, parents should be taught about the key language and literacy concepts their children should be acquiring in the early years. Second, parents should learn to provide specific activities to promote children’s literacy. For example, pointing out letter names and sounds on food items in the grocery store. Third, when children begin formal schooling, parents must continue to receive an overview of the skills being targeted and specifically what they can do to help at home.
Across all of these actions, educators must be specific and ensure all activity suggestions are rooted in the evidence.
Centring education on the child, but in the context of the family, is an idea whose time has come in literacy education. Family-centred care dramatically changed pediatric health care and improved health outcomes for children. Education and literacy outcomes could be similarly improved with more genuine valuing of the role of family in children’s lives.
Erin Schryer, PhD, is the Executive Director of Elementary Literacy Inc., a provincial non-profit organization in New Brunswick. She maintains a Facebook page and Youtube channel sharing research-based language and literacy information and tips for parents and caregivers of young children @DrErinSchryer.
Nicole Letourneau is an expert advisor with EvidenceNetwork.ca and a professor in the Faculties of Nursing and Medicine. She also holds the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation Chair in Parent-Infant Mental Health at the University of Calgary.
