Chapter 7: Family Literacy: Promising Perspectives and Practices in the New Millennium

One of the eight goals introduced in the United States Department of Education’s (1993)Goals 2000: Educate America is the composition of partnerships with parents. Family literacy is an educational and public policy attempt to align early childhood and adult literacy education. The fundamental assumption of the family literacy treatment is that “Parents are the first teachers their children have, and they are the teachers that children have for the longest time” (Morrow, 1995, p. 6). According to Durkin (1974), “…the family’s role in teaching reading has a long history. In fact, the descriptions of the earliest education in the United States indicated that beginning reading was once taught more often in a kitchen than in a classroom” (p. 136). In 1862, Tolstoy (1967) wrote that reading as a mother would read with her child “will always remain the best and only one for teaching people to read and read fluently” (p. 264). Later Huey (1908) wrote that “the secret of it all [literacy] lies in the parents reading aloud to and with their children” (p. 332). In the 1950s Sheldon and Carrillo (1952) showed that the percentage of good readers increases with the addition in the number of books in the home. Durkin (1966) examined the children’s home experiences for indexes of literacy acquisition. She showed that being read to stimulates an interest in reading. In addition, she reported that children who learn to read before first grade are the ones who are read to by siblings, parents, or other caring adults. In the later 1970s and early 1980s the academic community initiated a sustained interest in story reading in school and at home (Wan, 2000). Nickse (1993) calculated that more than 500 family literacy programs existed in the 1990s and this number continues to increase rapidly. Several state and federal government programs (e.g., Head Start, the Family School Partnership Program (PACE), Even Start) stimulated these initiatives (Cairney, 2000). Evidently, the importance of parents reading to children has been recognized for more than two centuries. The importance of reading to children at home was actually acknowledged by Congress in 1998 when it passed the Reading Excellence Act which guarantees that all children are able to read well and independently by the end of third grade, and the Workforce Investment Act substitutes the National Adult Literacy Act of 1991 by providing family literacy, adult basic education, and ESL programs.