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Communities and Schools Promoting Health
A Gateway to
information on comprehensive school health (CSH) and health promoting
schools (HPS) |
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Français PDF Version List of Resources/Research
Informing, Educating, Involving,
Supporting & Empowering Parents
through Schools to Promote Health. A Summary
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This page presents a summary of successful approaches to parent involvement. These include:
- flexibility for different types of involvement
- addressing barriers through selected strategies
- understanding the research
Summary of Successful Parent Involvement Approaches.
A Continuum of Parental Involvement is Needed
Not all parents have the time or resources to be fully involved in
school activities. Consequently, there needs to be a variety of specific
ways that parents can become involved. Individual parent involvement in
school-related health promotion can occur in these ways:
- being regularly informed of their child's progress in health instruction and their social and health-related development
- receiving additional, regular reports when their child is experiencing difficulty
- being informed of health or social problems relevant to their community
- receiving information on the goals of the school's health programs and relevant community health services
- being involved in home-based learning activities that support the health curriculum and classroom instruction
- responding to surveys on school health issues and programs
- being educated or trained in parenting skills or strategies on specific health problems
- being a parent volunteer for school activities relating to health
- electing parents to school advisory committees or councils that take an interest in health issues
Collectively, parents can be involved in these ways:
- organizing a parent information meeting, workshop, parenting course or parent resource center in the school
- serving on a parent committee or subcommittee on health
- fundraising for health materials, resources or equipment for the school
- forming a group to advocate for school or community health policies, programs or services
- advocating for policy from the municipality, school board or board of health
- forming or joining a voluntary or self-help group
Inform, Educate, Involve, Support and Empower Parents
involving, supporting and empowering.
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Informing parents |
about health issues, programs and policies is a bare minimum. This is the
type of approach most often used by schools and health agencies. The strategy
raises general awareness within the population using the school to transmit
information. |
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Educating/ training parents |
in health-related
knowledge or skills and child/youth development is the next stage. There
are several programs addressing single health issues, as well as, general
parent effectiveness programs that illustrate this type of approach. Often
an external agency partners with a school to offer this type of program.
At-risk families are often seen as the client for such programs but are often
most difficult to reach. |
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Involving parents |
with
their children's learning is a basic function of schools and is often done
both individually and collectively through parents advisory or decision-making
committees. However, this does not always extend to parents being involved
in school/community decision-making about health education, prevention and
promotion programs. This approach seeks to change the way programs, services
and policies are developed and implemented within the school, district,
health agency or community. |
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Supporting Parents |
by delivering
support services such as family health screening, early literacy programs,
information and counselling services, toy lending libraries, nutrition programs
and other services through evening activities at the school school and parent
resource centres throughout the day and evening. |
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Empowering parents |
to influence public policy decisions. The goal of these activities is to share the decision-making process with parents so that self-help or advocacy groups are supported and new or different programs, services or policies are introduced that support parental participation. |
Address Key Barriers and Use Specific Strategies to Ensure Success
As well, proponents of parent involvement in health promotion through schools should be well aware of the research evidence and rationale for working with parents through the school setting. See also the summary and read the documents linked to the sub-section on Research Evidence.
This
summary has been prepared with funding provided by the
Population
Health Fund, Health Canada
Key Resources
