Chapter 8: From Avoiding or Blaming Parents to Working with Parents

The period of early adolescence can be fraught with difficulty or rife with opportunity, depending to a large extent on how well the people in the contexts in which students live and spend their time work together. For that reason, parent school engagement continues to be as, or even more, important during the middle grades years than it was during the earlier grades. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why parental engagement matters to middle-level students and educators, to present guidelines and principles for engaging parents (adults who are bringing up and responsible for the young adolescent), and to discuss the various ways parents are engaged and how educators can utilize that knowledge to design a comprehensive parental engagement program for a self-enhancing middle level school.