Competent Families, Collaborative Professionals

ABSTRACT

A brief empowered parent education strategy was developed and evaluated on African American, Head Start parents against a conventional parent education approach. Parents who participated in this unique approach to parent education critiqued the content and process of a conventional parent education strategy and collaborated with professionals to design and conduct their own culturally relevant parent workshop. Engagement for parents who participated in the empowered strategy was significantly greater than parents who participated in the conventional one. Content was judged as more relevant and presenter behavior was judged as more respectful than in the conventional approach. Ninety percent of participants queried preferred empowered parent education when asked which workshop they would attend if given the choice. Implications for our understanding of the construct of empowerment as well as for the design and implementation of parent education strategies with low-income and minority parents are discussed.

Key Words:

• Parent education
• parent training
• empowerment
• cultural relevance