Head Start: Birth to Five Father Engagement Guide
Head Start: Birth to Five Father Engagement Guide
Explore this practical guide to learn how program staff build strong, meaningful, and authentic relationships with fathers in Head Start and Early Head Start programs. These relationships are the foundation of family partnerships that influence outcomes for children, families, and fathers. Find strategies early childhood leaders can apply right away. Review ideas for practice and reflection.
Dad’s Rock: Engagement Toolkit (PDF)
The Dad’s Rock Engagement Toolkit provides many ways to use The Dad’s Rock video to promote discussion and reflection on father engagement. It includes practical tips for schools, for teachers, for community groups, for men, and for women to consider in adopting a more father-friendly approach and a Father Friendliness Agency Self-assessment.
Use the toolkit and share the film to spark conversations with potential partners in your community.
Dad’s Rock: Nurturing Family Engagement Video
Dads Rock follows fathers on the journey to deepen their bonds with their children and the professionals working to improve father engagement. The research is clear that children do better when dads are involved, and yet all too often, agencies struggle to attract fathers to their services, and fathers face unconscious bias that keeps them at arms’ length. Highlighting the work of the Children’s Trust of Massachusetts Fatherhood Initiative, this film provides a fly-on-the-wall look at home visiting with dads, father support groups, and professional men’s family service providers’ groups to provide insights into working differently with dads and addressing existing biases.
Share the film and use the Engagement Toolkit to spark conversations with potential partners in your community.
Involving Families in Intervention and Assessment (PDF)
A young child’s healthy development depends on many factors, including early assessment and intervention for children who have delays or disabilities. When parents and other caregivers are involved as active partners, everyone benefits: families, programs, and children!
In this free downloadable toolkit, you’ll get strategies, tip sheets, and other tools for keeping families involved and engaged throughout the whole process of assessment and intervention. Discover the why and the how of family participation, get guidance on overcoming challenges, and find links to more helpful resources.
Using Your Story to Teach Toolkit (PDF)
The purpose of this guide from the Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPTA) is to provide a roadmap for crafting a family story that will teach pre-service and in-service personnel in early childhood intervention what family centered, culturally responsive practices should look like. This guide can be used by family leaders to prepare families as trainers in state personnel development efforts. Using family stories to teach can be a powerful tool to prepare pre-service and in-service providers for successful partnerships with families that will improve child outcomes. Family stories can help providers understand how to partner with families in building capacity that will support child development and lifelong learning.
La Sopa de la Abuela: Special Education Telenovela
Series of Family Engagement Videos in Spanish!
This series was designed to support the engagement of families in the special education process, share information, encourage advocacy skills, and foster collaborative home-school partnerships which positively impact student success. Created by a design team that included family and staff members, we hope you’ll join us for the journey of one family as they navigate their emotions, learn about special education, and make decisions.
Family Engagement Core Competencies
The purpose of the Family Engagement Core Competencies is to create a nationally agreed-upon and unifying set of professional competencies for family-facing professionals to practice family engagement in education across the developmental spectrum, particularly one that is grounded in an equity and social justice orientation.
Parent Child Social Games (PDF)
When infants begin showing interest in their parents and other adults, the time is right to play social games. Social games are back-and-forth, your-turn-my-turn infant-adult play accompanied by short rhymes or songs that engage infants in playful interactions. Some of the results of playing social games with your child are active child participation, lots of playful bouts of back-and-forth communication, and bunches of smiles and laugher.
Download a Spanish Version (PDF)
Five Ways Father’s Support Their Child’s Learning Every Day (Downloadable Poster)
Share this simple handout with families. It highlights how fathers support children’s learning in ways that apply to all children, including those with disabilities.
Supporting Fathers of Children with Special Needs (Brief)
“The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) has developed this research brief to help fatherhood practitioners increase their awareness and understanding of the experiences of fathers of children with special needs. The brief explains several of the more common special needs, describes challenges that fathers of children with special needs may face, and provides tips to help fatherhood programs better support these fathers. Because most research on the experience of parents of children with special needs has focused on mothers, we draw from both published research and interviews with program staff who have experience in serving fathers with children with special needs.”