[Reading-hall-of-fame] Global and National Parents Days

[Thomas Sticht]

5/31/2023

Global and National Parents Days

Tom Sticht, International Consultant in Adult Education (Ret.)

On June 1st the nations of the world celebrate the Global Day of Parents
(GDP) established by proclamation of the United Nations General Assembly in
2012 and first celebrated a decade ago on June 1, 2013.

This international recognition of parents was preceded about a decade
earlier in the United States when in 1994 President William Clinton signed
into law a resolution by the U. S. Congress establishing the fourth Sunday
of every July as Parents Day, recognizing the role of parents in the
physical, mental, and social development of children.

On both these special days in June and July attention is called to the
important role of parenting in the lives of adults and their children. Now
a new resource for advancing parenting in the rearing of children is
available: Parent Nation, a new internet site online at
https://parentnation.org. Based on the 2022 book by Dana Suskind the web
site aims to enhance the power of parents in their children’s physical,
cognitive, and social development. Partnering with a number of other
organizations, including the National Center for Families Learning
(formerly NC for Family Literacy) and Parents as Teachers, Parent Nation
calls attention to the need for support services, including education, for
parents in their critical work of raising children.

This emphasis upon parenting and its relationship to adult literacy
education was earlier noted in Sticht (2011) which called attention to a
substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a call for the
instruction of parents in the means of improving children’s learning at
home and thereafter their learning at school. This article also calls
attention to the work of Hart & Risley (2003) on the thirty million word
gap between the number of words heard by children from welfare versus
professional family homes. Interestingly, this thirty million word (TMW)
gap became the basis for the name of the TMW Center for Early Learning &
Public Health at the University of Chicago in 2017. The TMW Center in turn
formed the 2023 Parent Nation web site discussed above.

The Sticht (2011) article reviewed the role of the parent’s use of oral
language in speaking and listening with their children and how this
affected the literacy development of their children, which was also a focus
of the Hart & Risley (2003) paper. A quarter century before that another
report with a focus on literacy became a best seller in the world of
education in the United States.

Written by Anderson, Hiebert, Scott,  & Wilkinson (1985), Becoming a Nation
of Readers called attention to the importance of the education of parents
in the further educational development of their children. The Introduction
to the report by Robert Glaser makes the point about the role of parents in
advancing children’s literacy and states: “The parent and the home
environment teach the child his or her first lessons and they are the first
teacher for reading too.”

One hundred and seventeen pages later, the report makes its recommendations
“ about the conditions likely to produce citizens who read with high levels
of skill and do so frequently with evident satisfaction”.

Importantly, and consistent with Glaser’s comments, the first two of
fifteen recommendations for becoming a nation of readers place the initial
responsibility for teaching children to read squarely on the parents.
Recommendation 1 states: “Parents should read to preschool children and
informally teach them about reading and writing”, while Recomenndation 2
follows on with noting that “Parents should support school-aged children’s
continued growth as readers”.

Four years before the publication of Becoming a Nation of Readers, Teale
(1981) published a paper entitled Parents Reading to Their Children: What
We Know and Need to Know. Here he takes us further back almost three
quarters of a century to the work of E. B. Huey who, in 1908, wrote about
parents, children, and reading, and quoted Huey as writing, “The secret of
it all lies in the parents’ reading aloud to and with the child”.

Sticht (2011) notes that Huey also wrote that with regard to adults with
reading difficulties, “The school of the future will have as one of its
important duties the instruction of parents in the means of assisting the
child’s natural learning in the home.”

This year of 2023, in June and July, 115 years following Huey’s
recommendations, buttressed by Becoming a Nation of Readers and Parent
Nation, we celebrate both the Global Day of Parents (June 1st) and National
Parents Day (July 23rd) in recognition of the importance of parents in the
intergenerational  transfer of knowledge and skills into the next
generation of children. With  the implementation of a multiple life cycles
education policy, which views the education of adults as an investment in
the educability of children, we get “double duty dollars”, we improve the
lives of both parents and their children.

References

Anderson, R., Hiebert, E., Scott, J., & Wilkinson, I. (1985).  Becoming a
Nation of Readers: The report of the Commission on Reading. Online at:
https://naeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Anderson-Hiebert-Scott-Wilkinson-Becoming-a-Nation-of-Readers.pdf

Sticht, T. (2011). Getting it right from the start: The case for early
parenthood education. Online at:
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Sticht.pdf

Teale, W. (1981). Parents reading to their children: What we know and need
to know. Online at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41961421

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