Equity reflections
Parents and staff can create "common ground' between them if they share a commitment to challenging unequal power relations between them and to valuing each other's specific contribution to children's care and education (Filp 1998: 350).
If parents understand their rights and responsibilities within a programme, they can be confident that their needs will be met appropriately and that their concerns will receive professional and ethical responses. The following principles and practices (built from the literature on parent-staff relations) can encourage parent involvement in policy and programme decisions.
Creating opportunities for regular dialogue with parents
Educators who wish to change their relationships with parents could start by drawing on these suggestions by parents to researchers about how to encourage good communication (see Mac Naughton et al. 1986; Balcombe and Tan 1996):
actively encourage parents to spend as much time in the centre with their children as they wish;
keep informal conversations positive, open and friendly;