ABSTRACT
Families, schools, and communities play important roles in socializing and educating children. In this chapter, we review the literature on the connections in these contexts that support students’ learning and we consider how parents, educators, and community members separately and jointly influence the education and development of children. Two purposes of this work are to encourage researchers who study families and parenting to pay more attention to schools during the years that children are students, and to encourage researchers who study schools and children’s learning to examine the influence of families and communities in children’s education and development. It is important to recognize that schools and teachers critically influence families, and that families influence educators every year that children attend school. Another purpose is to illustrate how research and development may help schools and families create broader and deeper support for student learning. It is important for educators, policy leaders, counselors, community leaders, and other professionals who work with families and children to understand the inevitable connections of home, school, and community, and to maximize the positive results of those connections for students.
