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Parenting: Disregarded treasure in education
A 2016 World Bank study on the role of parenting found that good parenting can reduce the achievement gap between male and female students.
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Children play in a playground at the Alternative School for Street Children (SAAJA) in Rasuna Said area in South Jakarta in this file photo. The school provides free early education for poor children or children whose parents are street buskers. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
S
chools and parents are natural partners, yet they never collaborate properly. Their relationship, unfortunately, is more like that between a service provider and its consumers. They should in fact be working together to improve education, given their common interest.
Ki Hajar Dewantara, our “Father of Education”, suggested that the “three centers” or three stakeholders — family, school and community — must work together to educate our children.
The problem lies in the implementation. In September, the World Bank and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade conducted a forum to display studies on early childhood education (ECE). The forum provided valuable insight from at least eight longitudinal studies by world-class researchers on aspects ranging from the impacts of early childhood education to the importance of parenting in the “golden year” period of children development.
A 2016 World Bank study on the role of parenting found that good parenting can reduce the achievement gap between male and female students. This cognitive and noncognitive longitudinal achievement study conducted in 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2016 involved 10,000 children between the age of 6 and 9 years in Indonesian villages.
Nozomi Nakajima and fellow researchers in this study agreed that positive parenting could strengthen the benefit of ECE for child development. This finding is consistent with the previous 2013 World Bank impact evaluation of a positive correlation between higher levels of parenting knowledge and abilities and better outcomes for children.
This goes beyond parents’ income and education: parents with higher levels of warmth and consistency, and lower levels of hostility, generally had children with fewer behavioral problems, better health, increased emotional maturity, higher communication skills and stronger cognitive development.
The synergy of ECE and parenting education is vital to ensure a good start of childhood development and education. The government cannot work alone and monopolize all the work. Parents have the most direct influence on a child’s mind and life — more than bureaucrats, teachers or neighbors.
