Educational success starts with the family

Successfully educating our youth depends upon our own family, our community, and our school system efforts aligned and working well together. As young adults become parents, they begin the process of educating the child. With any luck the child has a great mom & dad and is living in a wonderfully nurturing and caring community with a school system that prepares each student to maximize their potential in the 21st Century workplace. How is that for a community vision statement! That’s what every child deserves, but all too often doesn’t get. Many children are beings raised by single parents, or aunts or other relatives, even grandparents. The last census identified 3,600 grandparents raising their kids’ kids in Delaware County in 2000. Thoughts on what the current census might identify?

From the day a child is brought home from the hospital, the family and the members of the extended family should be focused on preparing that child for life. Speaking to the child, helping the child learn the alphabet, and reading to the baby are very important steps in the developmental process. As a relatively new Pop-Pop, I have a small role in preparing Faith, Ben, Jackson and Trinity for success. Every babysitting opportunity involves snuggling up to Pop Pop while he reads Cat in the Hat, Are You My Mother or Green Eggs and Ham to the little guys or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing with Faith. Through love and nurturing, the family must take the lead in guiding that child to not only learn the alphabet, but to communicate, to be part of the family and eventually how to be part of a community. The child has to see that the family values education, and that education can bring success.

As a child develops, the community supports --like quality child care, head start, recreational activities, and others are needed to keep the development going. The school system can then begin to build upon the foundation which the family has developed.

My grandmother helped to instill my belief that educational success starts with the family. She had been widowed in 1922, pregnant with her fourth child. She had no education, but she was determined that her children would, because Mom-Mom knew that the only way her children would escape poverty was education. She scrubbed floors in what was then the new Fidelity Building at Broad and Walnut at night so she could be home while the kids attended school. Not only did her children each receive an education, her 11 grandchildren all have college degrees, most with Masters and include degrees from 4 ivy-league schools.

Friday: Kudos