Photo: Caroline Silber for Strategies for Children

One of the most powerful ways to help children succeed is through evidence-based family engagement efforts.

The challenge is how to do this work well, which is why a newly released state resource — “Strengthening Partnerships: A Framework for Prenatal through Young Adulthood Family Engagement in Massachusetts – is so important.

As this framework explains:

“Family engagement is crucial for healthy growth of children and youth in all domains of health and development.”

To help children achieve this healthy growth, the framework points to five guidelines:

• “Each family is unique, and all families represent diverse structures.”

• “Acknowledging and accepting the need to engage all families is essential for successful engagement of diverse families and includes recognizing the strengths that come from their diverse backgrounds.”

• “Building a respectful, trusting, and reciprocal relationship is a shared responsibility of families, practitioners, organizations, and systems.”

• “Families are their child’s first and best advocate,” and

• “Family engagement must be equitable.”

Engaging families begins with adopting the strengths-based approach mentioned in the second guideline to build programs that are culturally and linguistically responsive, the framework says. Such an approach involves a number of steps, including “acknowledging, respecting, and learning from individual and group differences; considering family preferences while adapting practices; sharing decision-making with family members; and approaching families as equal and reciprocal partners.”

The framework calls on organizations to develop a two-generation approach, explaining:

“A whole-family approach does not arrange services and opportunities for the child/youth and the adults in their lives into separate silos; instead it tends to the needs of and tracks outcomes for both children/youth and adults simultaneously. Two-generation approaches draw from research findings that the development and well-being of children/youth is reciprocally dependent on the well-being and successes of the adults in the family.”

The framework was produced by these state entities:

Board of Library Commissioners

Department of Public Health

Children’s Trust

Department of Transitional Assistance

Department of Early Education and Care

Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council

Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

Office of Refugees and Immigrants

University of Massachusetts – Boston

Department of Mental Health

The framework also draws on input from the Regional Family Engagement Coalition, a group of 500 members that includes families, home visitors, early educators, early intervention specialists and family engagement professionals – as well as libraries, museums, and health care centers.

Reflecting the diversity of its many contributors, the framework calls for the development of diverse and innovative approaches to engaging families, including:

• engaging families through peer-to-peer interactions

• building relationships with community partners to facilitate appropriate referrals for family well-being

• creating different ways for families to share their voices and participate in decision making — by, for example, participating on committees or engaging in the interviewing and hiring of program staff who interact with families

• providing support and opportunities for civic engagement on topics important to families, and

• working with families to create bridges between children’s development and what they learn at home, in school, and in their communities

As the framework concludes, all these elements “work in concert to position practitioners, organizations, and communities, in partnership with families, to move from the planning and designing phase to the actual implementation of authentic family engagement strategies that meet the individual needs of the families.”

It’s an opportunity to make family engagement an essential and thriving part of life in Massachusetts.