What Parents Can Do

Welcome to CSCD’s parent involvement page. We are pleased to have worked with Mona Noyes, the Character Education Committee Chairperson for the New Jersey PTA to prepare the following guidance and information.

Parents and other primary caregivers play the single biggest role in the development of children’s moral development and their emerging character. As with other developmental goals, parents and schools must work together to help our children learn how to use this inborn moral capacity to create their own moral compass to stand the tests of life.

The evidence is clear that parent involvement is a crucial characteristic of effective character education programs in our schools (Berkowitz and Bier, 2005) in addition to the long-standing evidence that parent involvement in school lifts academic performance (Henderson and Berla, 1995).

So, what can parents do to be help schools in their character development mission and what can schools do encourage parent involvement? The following should help provide the framework for parent involvement to Become Informed, Look at What Others Are Doing and Take Action.