"Teach Your Parents Well"

"Teach Your Children" was a song written by Graham Nash while I was growing up. The second part, "Teach your parents well,Their children's hell will slowly go by, and feed them on your dreams. The one they pick's the one you'll know by", had always impressed me although it was just simply a repeat of the first part with parents and children exchanging places. The message was quite clear to me. We were all in this together and amidst our struggles, we should always be kind and tolerant with others and with ourselves. But since the song starts with "teach", the song for me now takes a different meaning when it comes to basic education.

This new meaning comes with the realization that basic education does involve not only the children but also their parents. Poverty profoundly affects education. Clearly, addressing this challenge needs to include the family. Such an approach obviously requires more resources, more effort, and more time. Not addressing the two generations, however, can certainly lead to an unfinished job or short-lived positive outcomes. The county of Tulsa in Oklahama seems to have found the right combination in its Career Advance program. This program works under an umbrella of programs that help both children and their parents.
Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP Tulsa) specifically focuses on a two-generation approach that aims not only to prepare young children for future success in school but also their parents through programs designed to increase parenting skills, employability and earning potential. Our goal is that children enter school prepared for success, families create a nurturing and secure environment for their children and that families are connected to one another.
CAP Tulsa teaches children. CAP Tulsa teaches parents. The Career Advance program specifically provides training in health services to parents while their young children attend a preschool program.
■■ CareerAdvance®, developed and run by the Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP Tulsa), is a model two-generation intervention that pairs early childhood education for children with career pathway training in the health care sector for parents.
■■ CareerAdvance® recruits parents from high quality Head Start centers and offers career ladders through certification programs in the healthcare field at no cost to families. Additional elements include career coaching, small peer learning groups, financial incentives for parents’ educational progress, and wraparound early care and education for children.
The financial incentives are indeed attractive, up to $3000 a year for good attendance and meeting both grade and credit requirements. Does the program work? Findings made by researchers from Northwestern University, Columbia University, New York University, The University of Texas at Austin, and Oklahoma State University - Tulsa show that it does.

The children are attending school:

Above copied from
P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Teresa Eckrich Sommer, Terri J. Sabol, Elise Chor, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Christopher King, and Amanda Morris.WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF PAIRING HEAD START SERVICES FOR CHILDREN WITH CAREER PATHWAY TRAINING FOR PARENTS?
March 2017
And the parents are on their way to a new career in the healthcare sector:

Above copied from
P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Teresa Eckrich Sommer, Terri J. Sabol, Elise Chor, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Christopher King, and Amanda Morris.WHAT ARE THE EFFECTS OF PAIRING HEAD START SERVICES FOR CHILDREN WITH CAREER PATHWAY TRAINING FOR PARENTS?
March 2017
Eckrich Sommer, one of the authors, emphasizes in an interview the importance of the whole package. Providing quality preschool and child care is obviously a good first step, but the fact that families are grouped and are working together also make a significant difference.

We all go through hell but we could work together....


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