Parent Involvement in Head Start and Children's Development: Indirect Effects Through Parenting
| Published date | 01 April 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12266 |
| Date | 01 April 2016 |
A A E G University of Texas at Austin
Parent Involvement in Head Start and Children’s
Development: Indirect Effects Through Parenting
The authors examined the extent to which parent
involvement in Head Start programs predicted
changes in both parent and child outcomes over
time, using a nationally representative sample
of 1,020 three-year-old children over 3 waves
of the Family and Child Experiences Survey.
Center policies that promote involvement pre-
dicted greater parent involvement, and parents
who were more involved in Head Start centers
demonstrated increased cognitive stimulation
and decreased spanking and controlling behav-
iors. In turn, these changes in parenting behav-
iors were associated with gains in children’s
academic and behavioral skills. These ndings
suggest that Head Start programsshould do even
more to facilitate parent involvement because it
can serve as an important means for promoting
both parent and child outcomes.
An extensive body of literature indicates that
children from low-income families enter kinder-
garten ill prepared to learn, anywhere from
one-half to a full standard deviation below their
more advantaged peers (Duncan & Magnuson,
2013). Unfortunately, once children fall behind,
they often stay behind (Reardon, 2011). One
generally accepted method for improving the
Department of Human Development and Family Sciences,
University of Texas,1 University Station A2702, SEA
1.432, Austin, TX 78712 (aansari@utexas.edu).
This article was edited by Linda Waite.
KeyWords: early childhood education, low-income families,
parent involvement, parenting,school readiness.
school readiness of low-income children has
been investing in early education programs
for them (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013). Past
research on early education has led to increased
efforts in recent years to improve access to
early care and education programs as a means
of improving the school readiness of young
children, especially those from low-income
families.
Despite this growth in the number of chil-
dren enrolled in early childhood programs, their
long-term benets have remained elusive (Puma
et al., 2010). Recent ndings that children learn
best when they receive support for learning in
their homes as well as in preschool settings
(Crosnoe, Leventhal, Wirth, Pierce, & Pianta,
2010) suggest that preschools that can success-
fully extend support for learning to the home
context may be the most successful in promoting
children’s school success. Many early child-
hood programs do in fact focus on both chil-
dren and parents, implementing what is known
asatwo-generation approach (Chase-Lansdale
& Brooks-Gunn, 2014), with Head Start as
the earliest and most well-known example. Yet
exactly how programs like Head Start, which
are primarily child directed, can change parent-
ing behavior in the home is not fully under-
stood. In this study we tested the hypothesis that
the crucial mechanism in the Head Start pro-
gram is parent involvement such that by becom-
ing involved, parents learn new waysto improve
their parenting behavior and that such changes
create a parent-mediated mechanism for Head
Start to have a positive impact on the lives
of children.
562 Journal of Marriage and Family 78 (April 2016): 562–579
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12266
Parent Involvement in Head Start 563
H S P P
I
The Head Start program is the largest federally
funded early childhood compensatory program
in the United States, serving nearly 1 million
low-income children and families (Administra-
tion for Children and Families [ACF], 2014).
Head Start was founded as a two-generation pro-
gram that provides early education for children
and encourages parents to participate in the pro-
gram and learn skills that can extend beyond the
classroom (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992). Head
Start has a heavy emphasis on parent involve-
ment; indeed, its Code of Federal Regulations
species that parents must be included in all
aspects of programs and requires that services be
provided directly to parents in order “to enhance
their parenting skills, knowledge, and under-
standing of the educational and developmental
needs and activities of their children” (45 CFR
Chapter XIII §1304.40 (e) (3), as cited in ACF,
2009, pp. 130–131).
With its two-generation emphasis, Head Start
serves as an ideal setting in which to examine
the role of parents’ involvement in promoting
children’s early school success, yet there have
been limited attempts to understand the extent
to which Head Start programs are successful
at involving parents. Prior work by Hindman
and colleagues (Hindman & Morrison, 2011;
Hindman, Miller, Froyen, & Skibbe, 2012)
revealed that there are few consistent predic-
tors of parents’ school involvement; however,
parents do became more involved in Head Start
both as the year progresses and when there are
more opportunities to be involved. There is
also some evidence to suggest that classroom
quality and teachers’ experience are linked with
greater parent involvement (Castro, Bryant,
Peisner-Feinberg, & Skinner, 2004). Although
these studies have added to our understanding of
parent involvement in Head Start, much is still
unknown about whether, and indeed how, such
efforts at increasing involvement translate into
improved outcomes for children. Given Head
Start’s strong emphasis on parent involvement,
programmatic outreach to parents warrants more
empirical attention, including the training of
teachers in how to engage families (ACF, 2013)
and the provision of more practical services,
such as transportation and care for children to
overcome obstacles that may hinder parents’
participation in the program (Hindman et al.,
2012).
P B L B
I C O
There is a rich body of literature indicating
that parent involvement during the early years
is directly related to children’s school success
(Dearing, Kreider, Simpkins, & Weiss, 2006;
Ginsburg-Block, Manz, & McWayne, 2010;
McWayne, Hahs-Vaughn, Cheung, & Wright,
2012; Miedel & Reynolds, 1999). Much of this
literature has focused on involvement in elemen-
tary school. These ndings, however, may not
generalize to preschool given that involvement
in early education programs will likely take
different forms from and have different effects
than involvement in elementary school. Given
the structured day of elementary school, parent
involvement at this stage typically manifests as
monitoring homework and attending organized
events such as PTA meetings. In contrast, the
more exible schedule of early childhood set-
tings and the expectation that parents should be
more heavily involved allow more opportuni-
ties for and acceptance of parent involvement
(Arnold, Zeljo, Doctoroff, & Ortiz, 2008). It is
also likely that the early childhood setting is
generally more accustomed to and accommo-
dating of parents’ presence in the classroom and
the center than elementary schools are. Parents’
involvement in early childhood settings can
take many forms, but the most frequent activ-
ities are volunteering in classrooms, attending
parent–teacher conferences, and attending other
school-related functions (e.g., workshops and
school board meetings; Castro et al., 2004).
Although it is possible that parent involve-
ment in Head Start could have direct bene-
ts for children, it is more likely that it will
have indirect effects through improvements in
parenting behavior, and it was these indirect
pathways that the founders of Head Start had
in mind when they decided to promote parent
involvement(Zigler & Muenchow, 1992). Parent
involvement was thus viewed as a means of
building parents’ social and cultural capital. By
getting parents involved, Head Start staff could
enhance parents’ skills, attitudes, and knowl-
edge, which in turn could lead to positive gains in
children’s development. To date, these potential
indirect pathways have not been examined, but
we explored them in this study. To be specic,
in the present study we examined three poten-
tial parenting mediators that have been shown
to be important for promoting child develop-
ment, namely (a) cognitive stimulation (Crosnoe
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