Parents as Their Child’s First Teacher
Note: Guest bloggers, Janis Baron, Founder and Board President, and Ali Barekat, Executive Director of Sunday Friends (www.SundayFriends.org) in San Jose, California, contributed to the first of this two-part series.
Many parents feel overwhelmed and unqualified in how they can adequately support their children in their personal and academic growth as their first teachers. The Sunday Friends agency supports families who have not been actively involved in their children’s schools in a Sunday morning curricular program. [Read more…]
Mary Ann Burke, Ed.D., Digital Education Expert, is a substitute distance learning teacher for Oak Grove School District in San Jose, California and the author of STUDENT-ENGAGED ASSESSMENT: Strategies to Empower All Learners (Rowman & Littlefield: 2020). Dr. Burke creates digital language arts and substitute teaching K – 12 activities for teachers and parents. She is the Cofounder of the Genparenting.com blog. Burke is the former Director II of Categorical & Special Projects for the Santa Clara County Office of Education that supports 31 school districts serving 272,321 students in Santa Clara County. She is also a previous Director – State & Federal Compliance for Oakland Unified School District, the former Director – Grantwriter for the Compton Unified School District, and was the initial VISTA Director for the Community Partnership Coalition in southern California. Much of her work focuses on creating innovative digital trainings and partnership programs for teachers and families to support students’ learning. These programs were featured as a best practice at a National Title I Conference, California’s Title I Conferences, AERA Conferences, an ASCD Conference, the NASSP Conference, and statewide educator conferences.
Parents continue to provide us with feedback that a primary challenge is how to increase play time with their children. Parents identified shortcuts that they use in the kitchen when preparing multiple meals for family members throughout the week. 
Parents continue to comment that they need more time and organization in their lives to relax, play, and function more effectively in their daily lives. This is no surprise as more parents are working outside the home more hours each week. Due to the high cost of living, parents are required to travel outrageous distances from their homes to their jobs. 
As parents, we constantly are challenged as to how and when to support our children’s learning at home. We have learned from teachers that children learn best when they are given the chance to explore academic experiences at their own pace through project-based learning experiences. Within the classroom, a teacher strives to create a holistic learning environment that can adequately support the social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development of each child. At home, we can enhance our children’s daily activities by allowing our children to explore and create at their own level of understanding with projects that facilitate learning. 
Two primary themes were shared by readers this past week. When considering random acts of kindness, validated parents felt more confident in their parenting roles. Parents also stated that they felt a sense of pride when others commented about how cute their child was or how cooperative their child was when socializing in public. Parents also confirmed that they felt overwhelmed when their child misbehaved in public. Due to the demands of managing a home and working outside the home, most parents have little time to reflect on life and the daily challenges of raising their children.