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The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted families from low-income backgrounds. The shift to remote learning has required parents with preschool-age children to adapt to new ways of collaborating with teachers. Given the longstanding inequities in the education of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, exacerbated by the pandemic, it is critical to learn about the challenges that parents encountered and how they supported their children’s learning. This knowledge will help to identify ways to better serve these communities during times of crisis and beyond.This study examined how Latinx parents from low-income backgrounds engaged in their children’s early education during the COVID-19 crisis. The term Latinx is used in an effort to be gender inclusive when referring to people of Latin American descent. We explored: 1) How do Latinx parents perceive and apply teachers’ suggested activities to support children’s learning during the early childhood education program closure? 2) What parent and child-initiated learning opportunities do parents report? 3) What challenges with remote learning do parents encounter? Twenty parents of preschoolers in a mountain state metropolitan area participated in a 30–45 min. phone interview. All parents spoke Spanish at home to a different degree. Findings revealed the emergence of more authentic parent-teacher partnerships and parents’ extensive engagement in teacher-suggested activities. Importantly, families created a variety of practices to support children’s learning and well-being. Yet, a vast majority of parents expressed feeling stressed with the demands of remote education, particularly keeping their child interested in remote learning. Implications for home-school partnerships are discussed.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools abruptly transitioned to emergency remote instruction. Consequently, expectations for parental involvement in school mathematics rose to unprecedented levels. We sought to understand the experiences of parents to reimagine possibilities for engagement in mathematics during and beyond the pandemic. Leveraging data from tweets using #mathathome and survey responses from parents, we identified who supported continued mathematics learning at home and explored the nature of the mathematics taught there. We found that Twitter and survey data sources described two largely distinct groups of those supporting parents to continue mathematics education at home, but similar findings emerged from analyses of each data source, suggesting that themes were common among different groups. Namely, we saw a commitment to continued mathematics learning and engagement with a range of mathematics topics. These topics mostly focused on elementary-level content, especially counting, through everyday activities/objects and mathematical sense-making. Most parents used resources provided by the school alongside resources they identified and provided on their own. School responses to emergency remote instruction were mostly asynchronous, and parents expressed a need for more opportunities to interact directly with their children’s teachers. We discuss what the mathematics education community might learn from these experiences to support parental engagement during and beyond periods of remote emergency instruction.

In early 2020, the whole world was confronted with the emergence of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Due to restrictive measures, Slovenia, like most other countries, was forced to close all educational institutions. Teaching and learning shifted from classrooms to an online environment, which was a major challenge for teachers, students and their parents and required a significant amount of adaptation and effort. In May 2020, we conducted a study to investigate parents’ attitudes toward emergency remote schooling. The study included 313 parents of students from the last triad of primary (compulsory) school (Grades 7–9; 12–15 years old), 147 parents of secondary school students (Years 1–3; 15–18 years old) and 35 parents of students in their final (4th) year of secondary school (18–19 years old). Specifically, parents of primary school adolescent children, in particular, reported having the most difficulty coordinating their work and the remote schooling of their child, and they also reported more difficulty motivating their child to complete schoolwork at home than the other two groups of parents did. Parents of secondary school students in Year 4 were most likely to miss personal contact with the teacher and rated emergency remote schooling as more stressful than the other two groups of parents. In general, parents rated emergency remote schooling to be more complicated and difficult than traditional classroom instruction. Most parents agree that such schooling provides students with less knowledge, which is also less consolidated, although they perceived teachers’ remote help for students quite positively. They also believe that online education will become important in the future.

This paper reports on Aboriginal parents’ perceptions about their involvement in a Western Australian pilot initiative called KindiLink. The program seeks to support parents as their child’s first teacher and thereby enhance Aboriginal children’s early-years development, while strengthening relationships between families and schools. A constructivist paradigm was used to inform the methodology which placed Aboriginal voices at the centre of the research. Data were collected from 125 participating family members, over two years and across 37 school-based KindiLink sites. The results show that parent contribution to and engagement in KindiLink provided a powerful context to acknowledge, encourage, and support parents. Parents identified the development of strong and mutually respectful relationships; the engagement in working with their child; and the incorporation of families’ cultural and linguistic knowledge into the program as positive contributing factors. The paper concludes with recommendations and implications for the further development, implementation, and evaluation of Kindilink and other programs targeted at disadvantaged communities.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been shown to benefit from parent-implemented interventions (PIIs). This meta-analysis improved on prior reviews of PIIs by evaluating RCTs and multiple potential moderators, including indicators of research quality. Fifty-one effect sizes averaged moderately strong overall benefits of PIIs (g = 0.553), with studies having lower risk of research bias yielding lower estimates (g = 0.47). Parent and observer ratings yielded similar averaged estimates for positive behavior/social skills (g = 0.603), language/communication (g = 0.545), maladaptive behavior (g = 0.519), and to a lesser extent, adaptive behavior/life skills (g = 0.239). No other study, intervention, or participant characteristic moderated outcomes. PIIs with children with ASD tend to be effective across a variety of circumstances.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused an emergency transform from traditional to distance learning at all levels of education, which is called emergency remote teaching. To explore parents’ views on students’ experiences of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their experience and perspectives toward remote teaching during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to parents who have at least one child who had attended a face-to-face learning environment prior to school closures and started remote teaching during the pandemic. 983 parents participated in the study. The parents’ views on students’ experiences of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, their experiences and perspectives toward remote teaching were discussed. The results suggested that the remote teaching process has been challenging for both students and parents. It is found that the remote teaching practices were mainly covered in core courses; remote teaching is considered as unsuitable for young children and students with special needs; the parents complain about social isolation, lack of interactivity, and increased screen time; and remote teaching has placed a heavy burden on parents. Lastly, the parents stated that their children acquired self-regulated learning skills and digital socialization during emergency remote teaching.

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have problem behaviors that interfere with learning and social interaction. This randomized controlled trial compared treatment with functional communication training (FCT) to “treatment as usual” for young children with ASD (n = 38, ages 21–84 months). FCT was conducted by parents with training and real-time coaching provided by behavioral consultants using telehealth. FCT treatment via telehealth achieved a mean reduction in problem behavior of 98% compared to limited behavioral improvement in children receiving “treatment as usual” during a 12-week period. Social communication and task completion also improved. For children with ASD and moderate to severe behavior problems, parent-implemented FCT using telehealth significantly reduced problem behavior while ongoing interventions typically did not.

Questioning is a core component of formal pedagogy. Parents commonly question children, but do they use questions to teach? This article defines \"pedagogical questions\" as questions for which the questioner already knows the answer and intended to help the questionee learn. Transcripts of parent-child conversations were collected from the CHILDES database to examine the frequency and distribution of pedagogical questions. Analysis of 2,166 questions from 166 mother-child dyads and 64 father-child dyads (child's age between 2 and 6 years) showed that pedagogical questions are commonplace during day-to-day parent-child conversations and vary based on child's age, family environment, and historical era. The results serve as a first step toward understanding the role of parent-child questions in facilitating children's learning.

The present article reports results of a real‐world effectiveness trial conducted in Denmark with six thousand four hundred eighty‐three 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds designed to improve children's language and preliteracy skills. Children in 144 child cares were assigned to a control condition or one of three planned variations of a 20‐week storybook‐based intervention: a base intervention and two enhanced versions featuring extended professional development for educators or a home‐based program for parents. Pre‐ to posttest comparisons revealed a significant impact of all three interventions for preliteracy skills (= .21–.27) but not language skills (d = .04–.16), with little differentiation among the three variations. Fidelity, indexed by number of lessons delivered, was a significant predictor of most outcomes. Implications for real‐world research and practice are considered.

The goal of early autism screening is earlier treatment. We pilot-tested a 12-week, low-intensity treatment with seven symptomatic infants ages 7–15 months. Parents mastered the intervention and maintained skills after treatment ended. Four comparison groups were matched from a study of infant siblings. The treated group of infants was significantly more symptomatic than most of the comparison groups at 9 months of age but was significantly less symptomatic than the two most affected groups between 18 and 36 months. At 36 months, the treated group had much lower rates of both ASD and DQs under 70 than a similarly symptomatic group who did not enroll in the treatment study. It appears feasible to identify and enroll symptomatic infants in parent-implemented intervention before 12 months, and the pilot study outcomes are promising, but testing the treatment’s efficacy awaits a randomized trial.