What Kids Need Most -- Sharing With Their Parents

In my last post (quite a while ago, to my embarrassment) I talked about the necessity for a good home-school partnership to support children in their learning.  Recently, two events have pushed me to think even more about parent involvement and how important sharing events and activities with their parents is to children's growth and development.

The two events that got me thinking in this direction were Neary Noodle Night, which was in the beginning of February, and our Book Fair, Art Show, & Ice Cream Social in the beginning of March.  Both are wonderful family events that should help to bring parents and children together and give them a good opportunity to share some of the things that are going on at school as well as to socialize with other parents and kids.  Both evenings worked well that way for some families, but not as well for others, and I am doing some thinking about how to help make them work well for everybody.  What happened at both events was that some parents and children spent the evening together, sharing the discussions about the baskets, chatting over dinner, or playing together in the gym at Noodle Night, shopping for books, chatting over ice cream, and looking together at the art on display at the March event, while other parents spent the evening socializing with other adults while their children ran through the halls and played with each other.  Aside from the inevitable behavior problems on the part of some of the unsupervised children, I was concerned that the evening didn't seem to work as intended -- to give parents and children time for sharing a school-related event -- and am thinking about how the evenings could be restructured to work better, to be fun for both kids and adults and to create that kind of sharing.

Along these lines, I bought a book at our Book Fair that I think relates -- The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick.  It's actually the beginning of a series, of which I have now read five, and I think it provides a great picture of parents and kids sharing an activity which at first was regarded rather negatively by the girls ("Oh, Mom!  Do we have to?"), but which over time resulted in great sharing and increased closeness between the girls and their mothers and gave the parents a window into the girls' world that allowed them to further guide them in their development.  (I do recommend the series, by the way -- they are enjoyable reading with some good learning and growth on the part of the main characters.)  I'm wondering if we could make some changes to our family events that would foster that kind of sharing as the primary aspect of the evening. Even if kids say they want to be with their friends, deep down they actually crave sharing with a parent and that means much more to them than an evening spent playing with friends. And, as kids grow older, they need parent involvement and guidance more than ever, even if they say they don't!