Parental Involvement in a Homeless Child’s Early Education

To begin, parental involvement is imperative in helping children navigate and maximize their educational opportunities. Homeless children are being deprived of a quality education, largely due to their parents being unable to be as involved as other parents. This is a nationwide issue and I’ve experienced it firsthand in both my hometown and in the city of Los Angeles. Children without reliable housing don’t have the resources to receive a proper education in their early childhood years, so it’s very difficult for them to be competent in society as an adult. To provide context, many of the children I’ve encountered seem unable to carry on typical age-appropriate social interactions. For example, I asked a child on Skid Row if he needed any water, food, or clothing and he gave me a puzzled look, then went over to his mom for assistance. Also, from my experiences in primary school, many of the lowest-performing students in my classes were those whose parents were unable to be involved and lacked the resources needed to help their children. These students came unprepared for tests, lacked the needed supplies such as laptops for research, and rarely had parents show up for events such as Back to School night where needs were communicated to parents so that they could be an active participant in their child’s education. These firsthand experiences further illustrate that homelessness causes these children to miss out on some of the most important parts of their schooling, which are kindergarten and primary school, in which they should’ve learned the basics to be able to function in society. This is primarily due to parental involvement and the resources that stem from that, playing an essential part in the educational system. Homelessness results in a lack of parental involvement within their child’s early education, which negatively impacts the quality of their education. While the solution may feel complicated, we must all see the importance of the issue at hand and start opening day-care and tutoring facilities.

To start, parental involvement is one of the most important aspects in a child’s early life and beginning stages in education. Parents are there to provide further assistance to their children if they’re struggling with school or anything else in their early years. However, underprivileged students, and specifically, those who are homeless, don’t receive this opportunity due to their families’ situation. Therefore, these children are starting their educational journey with disadvantages, compared to their more privileged classmates, so a change needs to be made to compensate for this issue.

In other words, children experiencing homelessness lack the resources necessary for a quality education. To dive deeper into this problem, privileged families have the ability to trade money for time, meaning they can get tutoring, babysitting, or day-care services for their children. However, with homeless families, the parents have to be in charge of all those previously mentioned duties, while also having to provide financially. This becomes overwhelming and the first thing to drop is typically the tutoring and education sector, which dramatically hurts these kids, but there’s no other option. Oftentimes the blame is put onto these parents, even though they are forced to make that decision. Esther Dermott, a highly-touted educator from the University of Bristol, and Marco Pomati, a highly-accredited author from Cardiff University explain that “lacking access to taken-for-granted necessities may mean that parents are unable to fulfill the requirements of socially acceptable engaged parenting” (130). This shows us that there are major consequences that come with the lack of education toward homeless individuals, and in this case, one of those may be the ability to know and perform the correct social norms. As a result, homeless families are not capable of performing all of the parenting practices necessary, because in most cases well-off families are getting tutors and babysitters for their children. This causes well-off children to gain an unfair advantage because even when their parents are absent they still have the opportunity to learn and adapt to society.

As a result of these “taken-for-granted parenting practices” not being done by families who are below the federal poverty threshold, many consequences then fall onto their children. These include poor education, a lack of social and interpersonal skills, and ignorance of social norms. All of these aren’t at the fault of the homeless individual, so we as a society need to make better strides towards providing homeless children and their families with the resources that they need; children who are struggling in school often need extra guidance and tutoring. In Homelessness Comes to School it states, “Even more than poverty, homelessness is profoundly destructive to the educational outcomes of children” (Murphy 28). This statement made by Joseph F. Murphy, a highly-reliable author, shows that education is the number one impact on children that make up the unhoused community, showing if they had the financials then it wouldn’t be a profound issue. Due to all these issues that have arised throughout the years between homelessness and poor education, the government, organizations, and individuals have tried to make strides towards eliminating the core problem.

Parental involvement within a poor family is still an issue in today’s society, regarding education, because of the lack of direct federal-to-family assistance. There have been efforts attempting to solve this problem including the implementation of the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, which has proved to be more focused on lump-sum and uncontrollable spending. More specifically, this act forced all states to revise restrictive educational policies and regulations. Additionally, it led to the encouragement of educators to “minimize enrollment delays, ensure timely access to appropriate educational services, provide family support services, and empower teachers [to become] advocates [for unhoused students]” (Rafferty). This quote from “Meeting the Educational Needs of Homeless Children” shows some of the steps that have been taken toward ending the correlation between poverty and poor education. Even though these have reduced the impact on homeless students, there is much more that could be proposed to further improve the effectiveness of these assistance programs. We cannot rely on acts and provisions from over 30 years ago, that don’t serve the people in need directly, to still be relevant in today’s society because new issues arise that have to be addressed by new laws and actions.

We need to create change and ultimately call for more direct use of government funds, so they are better allocated to those truly in need. Previously mentioned solutions haven’t been successful because the government tends to give the low-income county’s a lump-sum of money, in which they have the discretion on how to use it. This could work in some cases, but the majority of the time, the county officials will inappropriately spend the money on unnecessary measures. Therefore, we need to focus on how we’re using the federal-provided resources, instead of being so worried about the amount we’re spending. “Federal Aid to School Districts During the COVID-19 Recession” includes, “We focus not on how much aid is optimal but instead on the implications of different approaches to allocating aid on progressivity… the relationship between per-child funding and the child poverty rate” (Gordon, Reber 783). This quote from the article shows the importance of looking at how each child is affected by the spending of federal funds by a school district, while also looking at those in poverty, separately. Viewing spending in this manner allows us to directly see if the money is contributing to the problem we’re attempting to correct, which is trying to implement programs that help with the discrepancy in parental involvement.

As a result, a more effective, better step forward would be to implement government-owned tutoring and day-care programs in areas of poverty to eliminate the educational gap between the well-off and the poor. Furthermore, these programs could implement liaisons that would better allow educators and parents to communicate and work together. These programs would directly serve those who belong to underprivileged communities, and those lacking the educational resources that many of their peers take for granted. This can all be arranged by utilizing school buildings or neighborhood churches, and capitalizing on community member partnerships. Implementing these programs would eliminate the problem mentioned in “Good Parenting Practices” which argues families in poverty don’t have the ability to trade money for time (Dermott, Pomati). These institutions would directly benefit those in need, which would mean that federal funds would be getting used in the most effective way, unlike how some school districts would choose to allocate the funds. “Informed Outrage: Tackling Shame and Stigma in Poverty Education in Social Work” states, “Social work education must respond in ever-nuanced ways to the challenge to structural explanations of poverty” (Beddoe, Keddell 150). These two, well-accredited members of the educational field in New Zealand, explain how students must be taught correctly how to deal with educational issues that come with poverty. Therefore, these tutoring and day-care programs would eliminate all issues associated with the parents’ abilities to teach their children and this responsibility would shift towards those working at such institutions.

Consequently, this change would result in higher academic achievement among homeless children and better integration into society. Homeless children and those in poverty would no longer have to worry about whether they’re going to receive the same resources as their more privileged classmates. With these new programs being implemented, the educational gap between the poor and wealthy is reduced greatly and it becomes much less of a “money” issue. This new change creates opportunities that were previously unavailable to those who didn’t have extra money. When you look at this problem in terms of long-lasting effects, more children who grew up in poverty will have opportunities to receive higher education, such as a college degree. Therefore, it will create a generational effect among the families who are involved and the end goal is that the family will no longer have to use those government-provided services. UCF experts in “Hidden Struggles” include, “Homelessness can strike college students at any time and for a variety of reasons: Financial aid is delayed. A parent gets sick. Sometimes a door has been shut” (Frick). This evidence from the article shows that with one simple mess-up, a child in poverty’s education can be at fault, but this wouldn’t be the case with these new programs. This is due to the fact that tutoring and day-care centers will always be available for those in need, eliminating the need for parental involvement within a child’s education.

All in all, money is at the core of the educational epidemic found among homeless students, so implementing government-owned tutoring and day-care programs in low-income areas would eliminate this problem. With these programs being implemented, it turns into a case of effort, because the resources are now there for those who previously had limited access to further educational help. Even though it may take a bit more effort for those in need to receive the same assistance as those who are more privileged do, the opportunity will be there. This is a major change, because before school districts and communities didn’t directly serve those in need with the federal funds they were receiving. Therefore, by encouraging these communities to open up day-care and tutoring centers, those who are underprivileged will be directly affected, in a positive manner. These potential solutions could help close the parental involvement gap for homeless families, allowing those individuals working in the day-care and tutoring centers to provide the needed resources and guidance to the underserved children in our communities.