Parents as Teachers (PAT)
An International Model - A Local Program
The Ounce of Prevention Fund serves as the State Office and provides statewide support for the 200 PAT programs in Illinois. Working closely with the PAT National Center, The Ounce provides the infrastructure for administration and leadership for PAT in Illinois.
An Introduction to Parents as Teachers
Formed in 1981, Parents as Teachers today holds to its original vision – that all children will learn, grow, and develop to reach their full potential, and that parents are their earliest and best teachers. Parents as Teachers aims to realize this vision by helping parents positively impact their children’s development, beginning before they are born, so that by the time they reach school age, they will be fully ready to learn. Since the founding of Parents as Teachers, the model has been adopted widely and replicated with diverse families in varied settings, both nationally and internationally.
At its core, Parents as Teachers is relationship-based and parenting-focused. Parents as Teachers is brought to parents in their homes by trained parent educators, whose goal is to help them build on their own strengths – using the most up-to-date research on brain science, child development, and early learning – as they interact with their children. In this way, parents become teachers in the normal course of interacting, playing with, and enjoying their children, and their children stand a better chance of beginning school fully ready to learn and succeed.
The Parents as Teachers model includes these components of parent education and family support:
- Personal Visits – Individualized, strength-based visits where parent educators focus on child development and parent-child interaction. The training and curriculum, together with the parent educator’s interpersonal and communication skills, bring a valuable service to families, resulting in measurable impacts.
- Resource Network – A network of community resources that parents can deploy as needed. It is essential that programs build comprehensive, collaborative, and community-based partnerships that build on family strengths, support long-term self-sufficiency, and impact real and long-lasting change. Because families often are not aware of services available in their community, the parent educator assumes a kind of “broker of services” role, bridging the gap between resources available and families’ needs.
- Group Connections – An opportunity for parents to share experiences, discuss problems, learn from other parents, support one another, observe their child with other children, and practice parenting skills. In addition, child development information is shared and social connections between parents are fostered.
- Screening – Tools to help parents understand their child’s development, recognize strengths, and identify areas of concern that might suggest the need for follow-up services. These include overall health, vision, and hearing screenings.
Ultimately, the Parents as Teachers model is a cohesive package of services with four primary goals:
- Increase parent knowledge of early childhood development and improve parenting practices.
- Provide early detection of developmental delays and health issues.
- Prevent child abuse and neglect.
- Increase children’s school readiness and school success.
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