Educational Programs for Parents

Within the Federal Education Development Program for 2016-2020, the HSE Institute of Education’s specialists have developed a series of exemplary educational programs for parents. First seminars on this topic were held at the end of February 2017. Specialists discussed the main ideas, structure and peculiarities of working with parents.

Katerina Polivanova, Director of the Center for modern childhood studies at HSE Institute of Education presented educational programs aimed at parents who have children of different ages. Her report was based on the parents’ feedbacks on such programs. First of all, there are lots of books about children’s upbringing and lots of online services for parents. Moreover, today parents do not trust traditional sources of knowledge: grandparents, doctors, teachers, etc. Also there is aso-called “discourse of intensive motherhood”, which involves that a parent has a great influence on a well-being of his child.

“Nowadays parents, especially urban ones, are overwhelmed with information. All the time they hear things like: “child at this age should be able to do that” and “you should do that”. There are lots of regulations that can lead to confusion, misunderstanding and desire to bring your child up using these rules. But such situation prevent parents from being independent and helping their child to become unique. Is it necessary to teach parents how to be parents? I think it is so people could find answers to their questions, so they could talk with each other and give advice. Parents should be given kind responds and psychological support. Of course, this help should be accessible for everyone, but we should not try to impose our views”.

Psychological programs form parents’ outlooks on how better educate their children and how to understand them. Each program is dedicated to a specific category of parents depending on the child’s age. Programs rank from aged one to eighteen.

Nadezhda Knyaginina, a researcher from the Center for legal applied developments of the Institute of Education HSE, presented a series of programs for improving the level of parental awareness in the field of law. These programs help them better understand their rights and responsibilities as parents. One of the programs is aimed at dealing with parents who have children with disabilities.

“The purpose of the programs is to form an idea that being a parent means being a legal representative of the child. In order to be such a person, a parent needs to know what rights he and his child have and where to find them. For the well-being of the child parents have to be informed of their responsibilities and that everything they have to deal with is enshrined by law”.

Before the programs’ developments there was a special research. In July 2016 there was a sociological survey of more than 2000 parents across Russia. The study revealed that 55% of the participants would like to attend special classes for parents. Among them are those who are already actively looking for information about the children’s upbringing. A third of the respondents are those who have already been to special classes for parents.

Programs will be tested in five regions of the Russian Federation. How they are going to be implemented will be discussed throughout 2017 during expert seminars at the Center for modern childhood studies at HSE Institute of Education.