Empowering parents: Ecological principles and guidelines for aiding consultants to involve parents in school prevention programs

The number of social and emotional problems in children's lives increases every year. Many children are growing up in an atmosphere of daily violence and fear. Even America's schools have become unsafe places for many children. Primary prevention has been recognized as a proven method for addressing the various social, emotional, and mental issues that occur in children's daily lives. The school has been recognized as a focal place to implement prevention programs. It is this author's contention that successfully implemented programs require the support of all those involved in children's lives. This includes teachers, parents, and school administrators. This manual focuses on the importance of parents in the process of successful program implementation. This work is for consultants who have the task of involving parents in all aspects of the prevention process in schools. The psychological construct used to involve parents in the process is empowerment. Empowering environments have been shown to increase individual participation in many contexts. Empowering parents will change the power structure of the school community by increasing parents' input into the social structure of the school. The majority of teachers and administrators have little or no experience working with parents in an atmosphere of equal power. For this reason an ecological paradigm needs to be used in order to understand how a school system will react to changes in the power structure. This manual reviews: (1) the importance of primary prevention in the schools; (2) the need for parental involvement in children's lives; (3) a paradigm which uses ecological perspective and the concept of empowerment as its guidelines; (4) the steps necessary for involving parents in school prevention programs with techniques and examples; (5) a summary of the principles and guidelines discussed as well as the preventive aspects of empowerment.