Community Engaged Parent Education: Strengthening Civic Engagement Among Parents and Parent Educators

• Author: Jenet Jacob,William J. Doherty,Beth Cutting
• Published date: 01 July 2009
• Date: 01 July 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2009.00554.x

A Publication of

the National Council on

Family Relations

WILLIAM J. DOHERTY University of Minnesota

JENET JACOB Brigham Young University*

BETH CUTTING St. Paul Public School District**

Community Engaged Parent Education:

Strengthening Civic Engagement Among Parents

and Parent Educators

We introduce Community Engaged Parent Edu-

cation as a model for civic engagement in

parent education. In Community Engaged Par-

ent Education, the parent educator weaves the

public dimensions of parenting into the every-

day practice of group parent education. It is

not a curriculum but a community-collaborative

way of teaching all parenting topics by con-

necting parents’ personal concerns to public

issues. We describe the origins, principles, and

core practices of this approach. Then we present

evaluation data demonstrating that parent edu-

cators can learn to implement this approach to

parent education, and that parents respond with

a variety of forms of civic engagement.

In the half century since Orville Brim organized

knowledge about parent education in his classic

book Education for Child Rearing, parent

Director of the Citizen Professional Center, Family Social

Science Department, University of Minnesota, 290 McNeal

Hall, St. Paul, MN 55108 (bdoherty@umn.edu).

∗School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, 2061

JFSB, Provo, UT 84602.

∗∗Early Childhood Family Education, St. Paul Public School

District, 1845 Sheridan Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55116.

Key Words: community, evaluation, mentoring, parent

education, parenting.

educators have become a distinct profession

working to help parents have the knowledge and

skills to raise their children well in today’s world

(Brim, 1959). Although most parent education

literature has focused on developmental and

familial aspects of parenting, there also has

been attention to the larger social, economic,

and cultural forces that create the ecology of

parenting (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Myers-Walls

& Myers-Bowman, 1999). As Goddard, Myers-

Walls, and Lee (2004) have observed, rapid

societal and even global changes are altering the

landscape of parenting and, therefore, of parent

education.

This paper introduces and evaluates Com-

munity Engaged Parent Education (CEPE), an

approach that builds on insights in the f‌ield

about the role of parents as members of commu-

nities and the larger world. In CEPE, the parent

educator interweaves the personal and public

dimensions of parenting when working with

parent groups. It is not a specialized curriculum

but a way of teaching all topics in parent edu-

cation. We begin with the origins of this model

and the principles and practices of CEPE. Then,

we present data from a demonstration project on

this approach to parent education.

CEPE emerged from the Families and Democ-

racy Model, which emphasizes the importance

of civic engagement to strengthen family life and

Family Relations 58 (July 2009): 303– 315 303