ABSTRACT
Family communication has come into its own in the past few decades, and with it questions about how children affect the family system and how the family infl uences their development. However, early childhood interaction has been a shadowy presence in the periphery of the communication literature until very recently. Given that fact, relationships among children, educational professionals and parents were rarely considered, much less examined systematically. With the burgeoning number of studies examining family interaction, plus the existing literature on student-teacher interaction, the link between the two institutions-familial and education-had to be made. Granted, much of the communication education literature is based on college student populations, but the question of how children learn communication skills had been raised long ago by constructionists and continued to emerge sporadically. If we hope to have an impact on social policy and practice, the communicative links between home and school must be clarifi ed. If we are to be responsive to the call for parental involvement in the education of their children, which has become codifi ed in the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, we have to fi nd out what that involvement means. This set of studies on childcare and education relationships begins to unpack the nature of parent-studentprovider interaction.
