Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children

Want to spread early literacy? Send in a parent. Moms and dads who talk, sing, and read out loud can fill their children’s worlds with engaging, enriching language.

But the challenge for Springfield, Mass., and other cities is figuring out how to reach parents and engage them in sharing a love of language and learning with their children.

To find good ideas on family engagement, the Reading Success by 4th Grade initiative (RS4G), which is backed by The Irene E. & George A. Davis Foundation, did a simple thing: It asked parents.

“Focus groups of parents, and largely moms who participated in one of our three sessions, revealed what we knew: that parents have clearly moved into the digital age,” Sally Fuller writes in a blog post on the Davis Foundation’s Read by Fourth Grade website. “Email, for anyone who has children, is almost recognized as a thing of the past. Moms told us almost universally that their primary engagement with the world comes through social media and texting. The smartphone serves as the communications tool of choice.”

Okay: To reach parents, send texts; but what kind of texts?

“We decided early on it had to be a ‘community’ texting campaign, where early literacy and tips for parents were just one component,” Fuller explains.

RS4G worked with partners — the local PBS station, the YMCA, the Springfield City Library, the Springfield Museums, Springfield Public Schools, and the local United Way’s Stay in School campaign — and borrowed the local area code to come up with 413 Families, “a community-based texting program for families with young children living in Springfield, Massachusetts that offers information about fun things to do—most of it FREE,” 413 Families’ website says. Parents also receive tips about health and learning. “Our goal: a better life and future for you and your children!”

“From the beginning, we realized the importance of incentives, offering free tickets to a community event, a gift card to a bookstore. These types of giveaways encourage our opt-ins to participate and engage in our messages.”

The service is growing, drawing in part on feedback from users who have asked for book recommendations and a listing of volunteer opportunities they can do with their children.

In recent years, the Brooklyn Public Library and a Stanford University program also started sending texts to parents to promote early literacy.

Researchers  who looked at the Stanford program found that, “Parents liked receiving the texts overall and reported doing more literacy related activities at home, while teachers also reported more parental involvement at school. The children of parents who received the literacy text messages scored higher on a literacy assessment than children of parents who received placebo texts containing general school announcements.”

These efforts make one thing clear: Texting is no longer just for teenagers.

Fuller elaborates, writing, “As we assess the way forward in reaching parents in the critical work of early literacy we have learned that no single strategy works alone and, at the same time, any strategy of parent engagement must employ the tools that have become part of everyday life for parents of little ones.”