Benefits of Family Engagement
The benefit domain includes the desired outcomes of family engagement for each discipline. Commonalities Across Family Engagement Benefits Domain.
Child Welfare
For children and families:
- Promotes family buy-in
- Expands planning options
- Improves the quality and focus of parent-child interaction
- Increases placement stability
- Improves the timeliness of permanency decisions
- Empowers families to make informed choices about services
- Builds family decision-making skills
- Enhances the fit between family needs and services
- Improves services for families and families' satisfaction with services provided
- Promotes safety, permanency, and well-being outcomes
- Improves likelihood of positive outcomes for families
- Increases responsiveness to families by the child welfare system
- Allows parents to model for children ways they can be involved and contribute
- Promotes family independence
- Mobilizes the family's informal networks
For child welfare professionals:
- Enhances the helping relationship
- Builds trust with families
- Reduces court time
- Improves relationships with families and the community
For communities:
- Enhances capacity to support families, which makes communities healthier
- Reduces time in court, and its associated costs
- Increases family efficiency in the community
Juvenile Justice
For youth:
- Reduces recidivism rates
- Decreases lengths of stay in detention
- Decreases behavior incidents during incarceration
- Improves school performance while incarcerated
For youth and families:
- Increases safety, fairness, and stability for youth and families
- Promotes youth and family participation and buy-in
- Increases families' capacity to promote youth well-being
- Expands planning options
For the juvenile justice system:
- Promotes positive relationships between the agency and other groups within the community
- Offers a more culturally relevant and appropriate service delivery system
- Improves workforce skills
Behavioral Health
Key Outcomes of Family Engagement
- Initiating and sustaining the use of services
- Increasing family satisfaction with and commitment to services
- Improving child outcomes
- Reducing the possibility of relapse episodes
- Improving family members' ability to cope with the issues
- Enhancing staff competence and increasing staff productivity
- Improving service development and delivery
Systems of Care Outcomes
- Children's and families' access to behavioral health and other community services increases
- Children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms decrease
- Children have an improved ability to function at home, in school, and in the community
- Family functioning improves
- Caregiver strain decreases
- Child and family satisfaction with services increases
Education
For Students
- Increases student achievement regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnic or racial background, or parents' education level
- Improves grades, test scores, and attendance
- Improves students' self-esteem and self-discipline, improves behavior in school, and reduces suspensions for disciplinary reasons
- Reduces placements in special education and remedial classes
- Increases graduation rates and enrollment rates in postsecondary education
- Reduces behaviors such as alcohol use, violence, and antisocial behavior
- Improves the school performance of students from diverse cultural backgrounds when parents and professionals collaborate to bridge the gap between the culture at home and the culture at the learning institution
- Enhances outcomes (transitions, work quality, plans for the future) for junior and senior high school students whose parents remain involved
For Parents
- Increases parents' interactions and discussions with their children
- Improves parents' responsiveness and sensitivity to their children's social, emotional, and intellectual developmental needs
- Increases parents' confidence in their parenting and decision-making skills
- Increases parents' understanding of the school curriculum
- Increases the likelihood that parents will be involved with learning activities in the home
- Improves parents' perceptions of and commitment to the school
- Increases parents' awareness of policies that affect their children's education
For Educator
- Increases likelihood of teachers and principals experiencing higher morale and job satisfaction
- Improves communication and relationships among parents, teachers, and administrators
- Improves teachers' and principals' understanding of families' cultures and unique circumstances, which in turn improves relationships with families
For Schools
- Improves schools' reputations and support in the community
- Improves performance and the quality of programs than programs
Early Childhood Education
Family engagement in child care and early learning environments may result in the following:
For parents:
- Building knowledge and skills
- Opening doors for employment opportunities
- Creating a sense of belonging
- Offering a sense of accomplishment
- Providing parents opportunities for significant change
- Increasing sense of personal power
- Increasing confidence in parents' ability to create change
- Providing parents opportunities to network with other families and providers
For children:
- Earning higher grades and test scores and enrolling in higher-level programs
- Being promoted, passing their classes, and earning credits
- Attending school regularly
- Having better social skills, showing improved behavior, and adapting well to school
- Graduating and going on to postsecondary education
For programs:
- Creating active recipients of care and services
- Creating advocates for the program
- Creating a positive reputation for the program within the community
- Developing more support for the program by parents
- Increasing staff morale
- Providing parents with the opportunity to discuss invaluable insights about family needs and preferences so that programs are truly responsive to consumers
The following are expected outcomes when applying the Head Start/Early Head Start Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (PFCE) framework:
For families:
- Safety, health, and increased financial security
- Positive parent-child relationships
- Participation as lifelong educators
- Education, training, and other experiences to support parenting, careers, and other goals
- Engagement in their children's educational transitions
- Connections to peers and community
- Established roles as advocates and leaders
For children:
- Improved school preparation
- Sustained developmental and learning gains through the third grade
For Head Start programs:
- Purposeful community partnerships
- Improved quality of programs and services
Positive family-provider relationships result in the following:
- Improvement in children's health; well-being; and cognitive, academic, and social skills
- Decreased problem behaviors in children
- Increased parent satisfaction with early childhood services
- Increased parent engagement in services
- Improvements in parents' self-efficacy, mental health, relationships with children and families, and interactions with children
Strengthening Families: Quality Early Care and Education Protective Factors:
- Parental resilience
- Social connections
- Knowledge of parenting and child development
- Concrete support in times of need
- Social and emotional competence for children
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