Know

Welcoming Each School-Age Child and Family

Where do you feel welcomed? What happens in a place that makes you feel welcome?

Spend a few seconds thinking about the two questions above. Then consider all the things you do in your daily work to make school-age children and their families feel welcome in your program. How do you greet children and families when they arrive and when it is time to go home? How do you ensure that school-age children and youth feel welcome, learn, and develop while having fun? How do you interact with them when they seem upset? How do you ensure that families feel welcome and supported?

Successful school-age staff members create positive, welcoming environments for the children and families they work with and strive for excellence in their interactions with others. The most important aspects of your work are the relationships you create and nurture with children, families, and colleagues. As highlighted in several courses throughout the Virtual Lab School, relationships form over time and require ongoing effort and commitment. Collaborating with others is a big part of your work, and whether you are a brand new or a seasoned staff member, your success and effectiveness hugely depend on how well you work with others. Whether you are engaging with school-age children, families, colleagues, or supervisors, nurturing these relationships early on is critical to your success.

School-age children and youth are constantly learning and changing. When families and staff members work together, communicate, and share what is observed and experienced, opportunities are created for better understanding and supporting this rapid developmental growth. Asking questions, communicating, and listening with families helps support continuity of care between home and the school-age program.

Understanding children and child development is absolutely essential in your role as a school-age staff member. The individual courses within the Virtual Lab School provide extensive information on each of the developmental domains (e.g., Cognitive Development, Physical Development, Social & Emotional Development) as well as strategies and practical ideas on how to promote optimum growth. You should refer to these courses for comprehensive information about school-age children's development. Along with school-age children's development, knowledge about topics such as Safe Environments, Learning Environments, Healthy Environments, Positive Guidance, Child Abuse, and Family Engagement will strengthen your competence and enable you to positively impact the lives of children and families you engage with. Optimum development is achieved when children in your care are healthy, emotionally secure, and socially connected. This development, however, cannot be achieved unless you put school-age children's families and home cultures at the forefront of your work.

When engaging with families of school-age children with special learning needs, you should work with your T&Cs and program directors to ensure that you have the resources and supports you need. You should work collaboratively with T&Cs, program directors, and family members to be sure that a school-age child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) outcomes are addressed (if appropriate) in your program. Successful inclusion of children with disabilities requires careful planning and ongoing communication among all team members. As highlighted in Lesson Two in this course (Working as a Team), building collaborative relationships takes time and attention but has meaningful outcomes on your practice.

You should work with your T&Cs and managers to ensure that families are welcomed and supported at all times in your program. Just as you care about how school-age children and youth are welcomed, you have to pay attention to how families are included in your daily work, not only at drop-off and pick-up time, but throughout their child’s time with you. In doing so, consider the following:

• Ask family members how they want to be involved and remind them that they are important to you.
• Respect each school-age child in your care and their families and acknowledge diversity and individual differences in growth, background, values, and beliefs.
• Share information with families about the work you do with school-age children in your care and, if needed, explain why you do things a certain way.
• Families can choose to be involved in various ways. For military families, it is critical to have flexibility in how they can participate.
• When families volunteer in your program, they need to have clear directions and a purpose and to know what the expectations are for them.
• Family members want to have meaningful conversations about their child. Make sure you keep them updated about their child's growth regularly. Acknowledge all the great things school-age children do on a daily basis and share those with their families often! Ongoing communication and collaboration benefits everyone.
• All families have strengths and all families have challenges. Focus on each family's strengths and build on those.

Introducing Family-Centered Practice

Because families are central to their children's development, they are partners, active participants, and decision-makers in their children's education process. As a result, family-centered practice is considered one of the indicators of quality in early-childhood education, school-age programs, and services. At the heart of family-centered practice is the belief that families are the most important decision-makers in a child's life (Sandall, Hemmeter, Smith, & McLean, 2005).

Family-centered practice also means that you understand the important effect all family members have on each other and on the school-age child. Each family member affects the other and the ways that the family functions. All family members are interconnected. From our families, we learn skills that enable us to engage in school and the workplace.

When considering family-centered practice, you are viewing school-age children and youth as part of a larger system; you are viewing family members as a whole. You become aware of and sensitive to the interactions and relationships taking place within the family, as well as outside interactions and supports that affect them. In an effort to maintain relationships and to work effectively together, you learn, respect and understand characteristics of each family and its support system. You can also consider the characteristics and stressors that may affect a family's involvement. What affects one family member can affect all family members. A family is a complex system in which no one member can be viewed in isolation.

Throughout the Virtual Laboratory School, we consider family-centered practice as an umbrella term that encompasses the beliefs and actions of people in your program. Consider this table:

Making an effort to understand school-age children and their families can create opportunities for you to better support the children in your care.

Honoring Diversity in Families

Some very important learning in the school-age years relates to culture. School-age children learn new concepts, ways of interacting with others, how to communicate, and how to play cooperatively - all things influenced by culture. Culture refers to the shared experiences and history of different groups of people. Cultural differences may include differences in views of family and community, expectations of children, roles of parents, and value placed on education.

Culture is a significant factor in the ways families raise their children and how you, as a school-age staff member, plan activities and experiences for school-age children. Examine your own cultural experiences and consider how these experiences affect your practice with children and families. Each school-age staff member brings specific values, beliefs, and assumptions about child rearing and development to her or his work. In almost every type of routine or transition you perform, your values about it were shaped by your childhood and training. As you work with school-age children and families, it is important to recognize your values and beliefs and the ways in which they are communicated. For example, a parent might expect a school-age child to complete all their homework independently, while you might expect to offer support, guidance, and assistance.

Sometimes, you might feel unsure about how to interact with a school-age child or how to engage families who have very different experiences and cultures, including those who speak an unfamiliar language or who may have unfamiliar religious customs. You can acknowledge differences and demonstrate an interest in the family in an effort to build relationships and learn ways to provide support to school-age children in your program. For example, you can learn how and when families would like you to assist their children with their homework, which may be influenced by culture. When differences are viewed through the lens of culture, respectful conversations can lead to agreement in how these practices will be supported in a school-age program.

School-age programs provide an environment in which adults and children can learn about and honor differences in values, beliefs and perceptions. Learning one's culture occurs primarily within the family; however, in school-age programs, children also learn about culture and experience relationships that influence their sense of who they are and who they will become.

To help children develop this sense of who they are and who they will become, you must honor and celebrate the diversity of families. Diversity exists in a variety of dimensions, including:

• Composition (who is a member of the family)
• Race and ethnicity
• Language
• Socioeconomic status
• Sexual orientation
• Ability or disability
• Educational background
• Values and traditions
• Child-rearing practices

Being a responsive school-age staff member means that you demonstrate sensitivity and consideration for the multiple backgrounds, experiences, values, and contexts in which children and families live.

Being a responsive school-age staff member also means that you are always professional and ethical when working with families. In doing that, you should practice the following:

• Keep information about children and their families confidential. This refers to reviewing child and family records, having conversations with other staff members in your program or in the community, or engaging in conversations with other people you know in the community.
• When you know confidential information about a child or family, use that information to help them and not judge them.
• If individuals ask you for confidential information about school-age children or families in your program, refer them to your T&C or program director.

See

Do

There is a lot you can do to show that you value the families of school-age children in your program. Consider the following guidelines that reflect family-centered practice, and then think about how you can use these guidelines in your work with children and families.

• Recognize the family as the constant in the child's life and that school-age staff members and service systems may come and go.
• Acknowledge that families know their children best, and learn to view them as partners and collaborators in your work. Reach out to them and invite their input.
• Facilitate collaboration between families and professionals.
• Encourage family-to-family support and networking.
• Honor and respect family diversity in all dimensions (cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, spiritual, socioeconomic, or in terms of family members' sexual orientations). You may do this by:
  • Asking families about their home language, sharing key phrases they use at home.
  • Demonstrating genuine interest about each child and family you work with and making an effort to get to know them.
  • Having family information and children's books in the languages of each family.
  • Inviting families to visit your program and sing songs, tell stories, and show books or pictures that demonstrate their culture, and, for school-age children, introduce culturally specific foods.
  • Observing how a family interacts with their school-age child.
  • Asking families to create a family or neighborhood storybook.
  • Meeting regularly with families to learn about their hopes, dreams and goals for their child.