9.17: Family Engagement
While children and adolescents may spend 7 hours of the school day at school during the academic year, the remainder of their lives is spent with their families and their community. Incorporating the family into efforts to improve knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions around health behaviors, can reinforce and normalize them. Healthy behaviors may then also “spill over” into the community as well, inspiring family members and friends to engage in physical activity, adopt healthy eating patterns, and engage in positive social-emotional health practices.
In order to foster family engagement, administrators and teachers need to make it a priority. Strategies might include communicating with families on health education lessons being taught and physical activity or nutrition behavior outcomes. Schools can also invite families to participate in decision-making by using surveys, focus groups, and community meetings, or including parents and students on the health advisory council to assist with WSCC planning and to determine the best ways to help reinforce efforts outside of school time. There aren’t yet best-practices established for family engagement that are proven to cause behavior changes alone, since many of these are part of a multi-component WSCC study (Michael et al., 2023). However, it is clear that families and schools need to work together in order to support the learning and health of students from childhood through adolescence (CDC Healthy Schools, 2021).