Parents are Essential to Giving Children a Head Start
By: Grand St. Settlement
Tags: Grand Street Settlement, Schools, Early Childhood Education, Covid 19, Parents

A parent and their child pick up food from Grand Street’s 80 Pitt St. Community Center on the Lower East Side.

Written by Willing Chin-Ma, Deputy Executive Director, Grand St. Settlement

States across the country are sending or have already sent children back to school. Educators are navigating how to safely return while addressing the educational gap that has been created since the COVID-19 pandemic began. This is a good thing. Children need to be in school and parents are understandably unable to provide the type of education and engagement that trained teachers can. When the call is made, I have full confidence that our schools will take care of our kids. In all this planning, however, we’re missing a major factor in children’s success.

What about parents?

Young parents have been heavily impacted by the economic disaster caused by the pandemic. Unemployment among young adults nearly tripled in the months following the beginning of the pandemic. Not only this, but young adults are more likely to be affected economically for longer periods due to working in industries such as food service or retail that are disproportionately

affected by the pandemic.

At Grand St. Settlement in New York City, where I serve as deputy executive director, we follow a multi-generational strategy like other Settlement Houses in order to reach entire families. Our early childhood programs work mostly with young parents of color who mainly work in low-paying service sector jobs. Their communities were hit harder by COVID-19 than those of more affluent, white communities. Many of them lost loved ones who were involved in their life and their children’s lives, living together in inter-generational houses or caring for the children while parents are at work. This compounds their grief with new worries about finding childcare while balancing a job.

Grand St. Settlement provides childcare funded through multiple government sources each with their own learning model and participation requirements. Some programs are what most might know as daycare centers. Parents drop their children off for a day of learning and pick them up later in the day. Services are offered for parents but they are limited and not required. In Head Start, programs and services are focused on the children and their parents, offering wrap around services and extended hours that improve a child’s life by improving their parent’s life.

Parents at the Bushwick Child and Family Center help their child learn to use scissors in December 2019.

This Head Start model will be key to making sure that families can be healthy, supported, and successful in the coming months and years. To achieve real economic relief, New York City must ensure that it includes support for young parents as a funding priority in reopening schools. Head Start has been extensively studied since it’s creation in the 1960s. These studies prove that the healthy child-parent relationships the program promotes improve a child’s physical, emotional, and educational development, setting them up for a lifetime of success. To have this healthy relationship, parents need mental health, economic, and personal support, which will in turn improve their work status and contribution to the economy at large.

We offer a parent stipend program at Grand St. Settlement. Parents are able to work shifts as substitute teachers or in other capacities at our early childhood programs for a small stipend. The parent gets more than just a stipend, also learning much needed work skills that can translate to future employment and receiving opportunities for mentorship, resume writing, and skill-building that can be vital to a young professional. They also receive trainings that teach them to cook, educate their children, and learn other skills that make them a more confident parent. Programs like this provide co-learning opportunities for parents to learn alongside their children and create positive change for their entire family.

The personal support offered in the Head Start model will be the most important subsidy we can provide for parents. The pandemic has been a dark time for many families. The weight of losing a job, losing family members, and the uncertainty of the future can be extremely damaging to the mental health of a young adult. In regular circumstances, finding resources to address these needs can be difficult. With new barriers of losing benefits through unemployment or needing to provide constant childcare, parents don’t know where to turn. We need to have more social workers available to help parents through these difficult times so that they can, in turn, provide emotional support for their children.

The economic recovery of New York City hinges on the success of the working class. Restaurants, stores, the MTA, and so many other industries are propelled by essential workers with young families. If we want to see New York City rebound as a more prosperous community, we can’t ignore the needs of such an important group of people. By following the Head Start, parent-centric model, we can make sure children are healthy and happy and that their parents are successful and supported in raising their children.