Social-Emotional Development as the Foundation of Family Partnerships

We started ReadyRosie 10 years ago with the hope that every child would experience positive, loving interactions with their family and caregivers. Every family wants the best for their children, and our goal at ReadyRosie was to provide prompts for families that could help transform the best intentions and desires into actionable, simple learning experiences.

We soon discovered, though, that in a world of hundreds of parenting apps, advice, and adages, families could hardly weed through the information coming at them. Therefore, we took a radical approach. Instead of taking our Modeled Moment videos directly to families and advertising to them through social media and blogs, we turned to the next most important relational figure in a child’s life—their teacher. We knew that if we could leverage the trust and relationship that families have with educators, we could really have an impact on families’ daily interactions.

As we have worked to strengthen family–educator partnerships as the catalyst for healthy, goal-oriented interactions between families and their children, we have learned so much. Our intuition that trust and relationships between teachers and families drive deeper learning experiences at home was proven. More importantly, we discovered this partnership provides an opportunity for modeling one of the most critical aspects of child development: social–emotional health and well-being.

While we could have just created materials for families and left it at that, we have discovered that creating tools that prompt partnerships is even more important. Family members and the classroom educator are arguably the most significant adults in a young child’s life: by creating tools that empower these adults to work together, we are modeling healthy adult relationships and skills, including how to

• collaborate,
• communicate,
• show mutual respect, and
• navigate cultural and linguistic differences.

We as educators cannot begin to say that we are teaching strong social–emotional skills to young children unless we are modeling those skills with our adult peers, especially with the families of the children we serve. By creating an empathetic, collaborative, and goal-oriented partnership with families, we give young children an example of how caring adults come together for a mission so very precious and unique: them!

With this philosophy in mind, we developed the ReadyRosie Resiliency: Raising Strong Children Family Workshop to equip families with tools for reinforcing resiliency principles taught in the classroom at home—giving young children the tools they need to be successful in school and in life.