ABSTRACT
This chapter by introducing the core principle, Establish Safety and Predictability, emphasizing its critical importance in a trauma-responsive approach to family engagement. The authors acknowledge that parents’ and families’ past and current experiences of oppression, marginalization and/or trauma coupled with the wide range of stressors many encounter on a daily basis can make the enactment of this principle challenging. The chapter then introduces the concept of racial microaggressions and how they show up in our work with parents and families in ways that undermine their felt sense of safety in early learning environments. They reinforce that the first step to addressing and disrupting racial microaggressions is to notice when they occur and drawing from Singh (Singh, A. 2019. The racial healing handbook: Practical activities to help you challenge privilege, confront systemic racism, and engage in collective healing. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications ), they provide several examples of microaggressions and the harmful messages they communicate. Next, a story is shared from practice that describes how one Family Engagement Specialist worked effectively with her colleague to address microaggressions providing a window into the type of conversations we need to all learn to have to improve feelings of safety for adults and children in minoritized groups. The chapter then introduces the core principle, Acknowledge Strengths and Assets, and emphasizes the need to begin with an assumption and belief that all children, parents and families have strengths, assets, sources of coping, resilience, creativity, brilliance and potential. This principle is rooted in a recognition that all families have expertise about their child and they profoundly contribute to their children’s learning, development and well-being. The authors state that central to a strength-based approach is listening, observing and learning about the families in order to deepen understanding of their beliefs, skills, knowledge, interests, relationships, cultural and linguistic practices, lived experiences and their hopes, dreams and goals for their children in our early learning programs. Deficit thinking is described as the most significant barrier that prevents early childhood professionals from using a strength-based approach in their work with parents and families. Authentic examples of what these two principles look like in practice are included throughout the chapter.
