Parents Get Lesson On Involvement

Adults need to hook children’s attention to build connections with them, Michelle Karns says.

That means they need to engage children at an emotional level. They need to give children dialogue, discussion, relationship.

Too many children are subjected to drive-by interrogations: What happened? Where’s your coat? Where have you been?

Adults need to restart the tradition of actually talking to children in order to rebuild society from its youngest members on up.

“The oral tradition and its moral content have been replaced by television,” said Karns, an author, trainer and teacher with National Training Associates. And “we have to shift our oral tradition from ‘how bad it is’ to ‘we can do something about it,”’ she said.

Karns was in Coeur d’Alene for the state’s first Parent Summit. The summit is part of an experiment in six school districts in Idaho including Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene. The Friday and Saturday events also were organized by the Parent Advisory Committee at Coeur d’Alene High School.

The aim is to get parents and other adults more involved in their children’s education - even with things as simple as reading to them at home, said Marilyn Sword, of Head Start in Boise.

“I think about the neighborhoods and towns in the 1950s, a spectrum of society that has fallen apart,” she said. “This is trying to bring back that informal network to bring back a successful environment for kids.”

That requires four things, Karns said. First, is support for literacy and skill building. Next, is developing meaningful ways for adults to be involved with children.

There’s the need to develop ways for everyone to be included in children and education, Karns said.

Finally, people have to have a positive attitude, to “see the world in terms of strengths and solutions instead of problems and fixes.”

The general guidelines are “listen, laugh, applaud, remember, confide, trust, cooperate,” Karns said.

“Notice it doesn’t say you have to get all A’s; notice it doesn’t say you have to be better than everyone else.”

Karns’ ideas on building connections also goes to the heart of other fundamental education problems, such as why area communities can’t pass school bond levies anymore. Outside of booster clubs, parents often are intimated by schools, leading to acrimony instead of advocacy.

“We don’t trust each other anymore and when we don’t trust each other, institutions collapse,” Karns said. “Without trust, everything collapses.”

She said that leads to attitudes like “property taxes are too high, so I’m not going to support anything because they don’t support me.”

Nearly 100 parents attended the weekend summit.

, DataTimes