Co-authored Book Puts Parents in Charge
Reprinted with permission of
Impact: The Office of Research Services report of the EEJ College of Education, 2009
Co-authors Lisa Boyce, Mark Innocenti and Lori Roggman
Developmental Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood Practitioners draws from more than 12 years of collaboration and research by Lori Roggman, Lisa Boyce, and Mark Innocenti. The three are affiliated with the Center for Persons with Disabilities.
In this book, professionals who work with infants and toddlers can learn to guide parents into the warm, supportive, and communicative behavior that fosters learning. The book focuses on teaching the professional to work through the parent. “It’s not just giving the mom advice, it’s not just working with the child,” Boyce said. Instead the authors teach professionals to treat the parent-and-child relationship as a single entity, and build on that relationship to set and reach goals.
The model also teaches early interventionists to be sensitive to families’ cultural backgrounds. The authors have studied the development of language and literacy in young children from a broad range of families and ethnic backgrounds. They have developed a checklist of parenting behaviors that contribute to a child’s readiness to learn.
“More than a ‘how to’ guide, it’s a ‘how come’ guide, providing a compelling empirical and theoretical background to developmental parenting,” wrote Jon Korfmacher in a review of the work.
