Parents as Teachers

By Frances Bryce, January 14, 2021 — This story is about me being a parent educator or coach for parents. My return to Philadelphia was from a request of my best friend, who was in charge of a community center. She asked me to come and join the program that she had just gotten a grant for. The grant was called Parents as Teachers and it’s a national program. So I thought about it and then I said: “Yes, I would [join her].”

The program she ran was from foster care truancy, rite of passage, and pre-kindergarten. These were for single parents and some of them had been selected to be in the program. And a lot of them were teenagers who had young kids. And they lived in an area in Philadelphia where the unemployment was 26% and there were a number of young parents who were teenagers and had children. They had very little or no parenting skills because they were children themselves. My friend called and talked about the program and asked if I would go to the place where you would train and get certification before coming to Philadelphia, which I did.

The reality and the real events were pretty soon apparent to me after I joined the program. I finally got the parents engaged in the session in one or two weeks, depending on the need that each parent educator thought that the child and the parent would benefit from. I coached parents who worked sometimes on two jobs and had very little time for what they began to think was another program and just used up some of their time. But after talking to them about what was program was about and that they really were the first child’s teacher and how that would help in the lives of the kids. And so we talked about how the kids could explore and learn things and so when they reach kindergarten they were up to par.
One of the parents that I had in the program, she was an older parent not a teenager, loved this little child that she had, and she was afraid to let him crawl on the floor because she though he might bump into something and damage his brain. So we spent time talking about minor dings were okay for kids and the brain had a covering. And so she was so pleased when she learned that something new that she had been afraid of, and that allowed her child to explore and eventually walk.
Then I had another teenage parent and her main thing was with her friends who had young kids was to dress the kids in the latest things, some of them even had brand name sneakers before they could walk. And so she said that was their thing with kids. So I said, “Well since you are already into dressing the kids, let us talk about doing something that the kids won’t outgrow.” And so we worked on that and I suggested that she share that information with her friend.
I taught one lady who had some learning disability about reading to her child. She couldn’t read and I said “The child doesn’t know you can’t read, so look at the pictures and make a story.”
Then the last parent was a parent who had a child that wouldn’t sleep at night so she had answered an ad for a promo for a cable company and she only told me about the problem when she got in trouble. Because the promo was over and she could not pay the bill. So she said the only way the child would sleep was if she could watch cartoons all night and that way she could sleep. So I suggested to her that the child would finally go to sleep if she had a little patience with her. And every time she got out of bed she put her back and one of things that she could do was read her a story and cuddle with her for a few minutes. And so later she said this helped a lot.
I did this fifteen years I think because I came back to Philadelphia to stay one year and then I was able to go back to California every Winter when school was out. It was quite rewarding, we read to the kids, and I did that until [there was] no funding and I couldn’t volunteer in those places anymore.
It was really, really, really great.

Eventually, they stopped funding it when the city got into problems and I had talked to the guy that ran the program to try to get the school board to initiate and take up that program. He never did. So the program ended and I did some volunteer work with the agency still for those kids I thought was most needed, but I even had to stop that because the agency felt like they were in jeopardy because they could no longer carry insurance for me. So that was the end of that.
There were many many stories where the parents received some information and used that information and some that they did not. But I was privileged to help some of the parents and not really be upset because I could not help every parent that I served. I was lucky to be in a position so that I could do that to help. You can’t help everybody but you can help somebody, and I realized that. You can’t help everybody but at least you can give them the information and hope that they can use some of it. And some of them did; a lot of them.