Blending whanau/family development, parent support and early childhood education programmes.

• Author: Munford, Robyn
• Position: Extended family - Report

Abstract

Internationally, the combination of early childhood education and parent support and whanau/family development initiatives are recognised as having the potential to improve child outcomes and overall whanau/ family wellbeing. This paper considers the experience of a community organisation that has successfully blended these two service components. The paper highlights some of the benefits of this programme, which developed from a playgroup and a counselling service in the 1990s into a fully developed community centre and licensed early childhood centre in 2004. The paper also considers some of the challenges the current policy environment poses for services that blend early childhood and parent support initiatives. Two related areas of tension are identified--the perceived emphasis on staff qualification as a key marker of a high-quality programme, and the funding model for early childhood care and education programmes--an unintended consequence of which may be to disadvantage services that have high levels of parent engagement.

INTRODUCTION

There is increasing interest in finding innovative ways of delivering parent support and education programmes that improve family functioning and reduce levels of child maltreatment. Early childhood education is considered to be a key setting where parent support and development can be effectively undertaken.

This is not a new idea. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s Barnardos New Zealand developed its Homebuilders Family Support services alongside its early childhood education programmes with these sorts of goals in mind. More recently, the potential of early childhood educational settings to facilitate improvements in parent capacity and family/whanau functioning has been the focus of a number of new initiatives, such as the Early Childhood Education Centre-Based Parent Support and Development initiatives (2) (ECE PSD). Internationally and locally, early childhood education has also been identified as an important resource, which, when added to parent support programmes, contains significant potential for addressing some of the more intractable challenges presented by struggling and vulnerable families (Brostrom 2006, Lightburn and Warren-Adamson 2005, Warren-Adamson 2001). Research in New Zealand has also identified the value of developing innovative and flexible frameworks for supporting families who face a range of challenges that make parenting difficult (see, for example, Munford and Sanders 2006). It is therefore an appropriate time to consider a range of models and frameworks within which this blending of early childhood education and parent support and development can occur.

This paper considers the experiences of Te Aroha Noa, a non-governmental whanau/ family and community centre that has developed its own particular blend of early childhood education and parent support and development over the past 17 years. Having its origins in collaboration with parents in the early 1990s, the Te Aroha Noa model predates the current interest in working across the early childhood-family support interface. The centre shares with other early childhood services the philosophy of providing a range of high-quality early learning experiences for young children within a safe and well-resourced environment. However, its structure, the staffing and mode of operation differ from traditional early learning centres, and it is this difference that brings challenges for Te Aroha Noa as it negotiates the complex early childhood education policy environment.

This paper begins by briefly reviewing the early childhood educational framework and the more recent interest in early intervention services that draw on early childhood education and parent support and development ideas. It then discusses the development of the Te Aroha Noa model and some of the benefits of this programme. Finally, it considers some of the challenges the mainstream early childhood policy context creates for centres that emphasise parent engagement but are not eligible to operate within the ECE PSD framework.

THE EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT

Government-sourced early childhood funding enables a range of early childhood education programmes to be delivered. More recently, policy has also facilitated the development of parent support and development initiatives, which some early childhood centres are able to access. Early childhood policy seeks to achieve two primary objectives. Early learning programmes, whether centre or home based, tend to reflect these in their services by providing:

* access for children to high-quality early learning and developmental opportunities provided by qualified practitioners

* safe, monitored care for young children to enable their parent(s) to participate in the workforce (Adema 2006).

These two characteristics are largely consistent, although as Adema notes, at the margins they create tensions. For example, the 30 hours per week of early childhood education funded by government reflects the 30 hours per week of education provided to primary and secondary school children, and while this may meet young children's educational requirements, it does not necessarily meet workforce demands experienced by parents. (3)

A range of programmes are offered within early childhood settings, some of which explicitly encourage the involvement of parents, but the delivery frameworks in responding to increased levels of demand from employed parents nonetheless emphasise the provision of education services and care for other people's children by professional educators and care providers. Developments in the early childhood model over time have emphasised this character, and over the past decade early learning centres have increasingly come to resemble "schools" for small children, where education programmes are provided by early childhood teachers (Adema 2006). (4)

This model also serves labourforce and welfare policies because, with the addition of childcare subsidies and credits available through the Working for Families package, (5) parental participation in the labour market is facilitated (Adema 2006). Both early childhood education and labour market/income support policies therefore encourage the provision of services to children and their families/whanau by professionally qualified teachers. (6) Less attention has been given to the way in which early childhood services can be encouraged to work with the needs of the whole whanau/ family. As Davies et al. (2002:31) have argued, historically relatively little consistent consideration has been given in social policy to addressing whole-child and whole-family /whanau needs:

Nor can it be said that consistent efforts are being made to address the needs of parents as well as the needs of children. Community and neighbourhood developments have not yet been widely promoted as part of the strategy to improve the parenting and well-being of the nation's young children. THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY INTERVENTION MODELS THAT BLEND EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION WITH PARENT SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT

Perhaps in recognition of the gap identified by Davies et al. (2002), early childhood settings have recently been seen as potential sites for facilitating and encouraging positive family development by providing parent support and development programmes. Indeed, early childhood educational services provide numerous opportunities for "critical moments" (Thomson et al. 2002) through which children's development can be positively influenced and the functioning of vulnerable families improved.

Warren-Adamson (2001:12), writing in the United Kingdom, has observed that early learning centres can provide the "spine of the resource" for community centres that seek to support vulnerable parents and children and to foster positive change. He refers to the way that, when combined with social support programmes, early learning centres have the potential to provide neutral and safe avenues for parents to begin to access wider support systems. They can provide non-stigmatising points of entry to a wide range of services and hold the potential for early intervention rather than reactive services (Davies et al. 2002:31-32). They also provide low-key, unthreatening opportunities for vulnerable parents to test out services without having to reveal too much of their own personal struggles, and to build relationships that can later provide much more intensive support. Early childhood services in this sense hold the potential to be more than high-quality childcare services for working parents. When combined with parent engagement and support, they have the potential to contribute to social policy objectives concerning whanau/family development.

In terms of understanding the potential benefits of well-designed early intervention programmes that meet both child and parent needs, Sykora (2005:118) observes:

Taking an economic perspective on the contribution that early childhood interventions can make to a society, Rolnick and Grunewald (2003, Grunewald and Rolnick 2005) report that for the long-term betterment of a society there are few economic development strategies that can yield a higher level of benefit than investing in getting children off to a good start in life. Locally, a number of government initiatives have sought to achieve these kinds of benefits with disadvantaged, vulnerable and stressed whanau/families. In these cases, care for...