Yesterday I spent an exhilarating hour with Ria and Sharon, two of the most energetic young moms I know! (Follow them on Twitter at @riasharon and @zenmommy.)
On their Web site mymommymanual.com they’ve kicked off a monthly online raffle to raise money for charities. Right now Parents as Teachers is the featured recipient.
YOUR SMALL DONATION MAKES YOU PART OF SOMETHING BIG!
1) On the first of every month, mymommymanual will announce a new raffle prize.
2) To be entered into the raffle, use the ChipIn widget on their Web site to donate at least $1
3) At the end of the month, they will draw a raffle winner!
This month, Artistic Sensations founder (and mommy), Kim Gellman is contributing a very cool Toddler Nap/Sleeping Sack valued at $45. Now’s your chance to get a very cool nap mat and contribute toward Parents as Teachers at the same time. Do it now. And be sure to check back in at www.mymommymanual.com for next month’s raffle, too!
Twenty years ago psychologist Paul Andreassen decided to see if more information helped people make better decisions. He asked one group to make investments based on very little data; the other had a steady stream of financial analysis and market trend reports at their disposal. The result: the less informed decision-makers wound up earning more than twice as much.
Surprised? A similar study, this time involving college counselors, discovered that those counselors who knew the least about a group of high school students actually predicted with better accuracy which ones would score better on tests.
It appears that having access to too much information during the decision-making process is counter-productive. It’s distracting and leads to over confidence and poor decisions. You can read more about this in Johnah Leher’s book, How We Decide, but it got me to thinking about parenting information.
Parents are bombarded with information, advice and resources everywhere they turn. (Type “parenting advice” into Google and you’ll get back at least 20.5 million results!) How many blogs, podcasts, web sites and eUniversities can a parent access? At what point does it simply become information overload? And how should credible sources like Parents as Teachers reach them?
St. Anthony’s Medical Center’s Charitable Foundation awarded Bayless Parents as Teachers program a grant for $3,600 to sponsor a Speaker Series for the program’s parent group meetings. William Morris, MD., Section Chief of Hematology and Oncology at St. Anthony’s, along with Jeff Randal, Executive Director, St. Anthony’s Charitable Foundation, presented the check at the Board Meeting on January 21, 2009. The partnership with St. Anthony’s has allowed this prpogram to provide speakers on The Biology of Autism, Nutrition and Childhood Obesity, and Parenting 911 among others.
Refreshments and free babysitting were also made possible through the grant and a different topic was presented each month. We are very excited to have been given the opportunity to bring in some of the top speakers in our area to meet with our families. None of this would have been possible without the generosity of the St. Anthony’s Charitable Foundation. Thank you St. Anthony’s!
Panhandling is a problem on so many levels. When the “Parents Talk Back” online forum asked, “How do you deal with the questions that arise when your kids see panhandlers?” most parents agreed with Dan Buck, chief executive of St. Patrick Center, the largest provider of homeless services in Missouri: stop giving your change. Donate instead to a charity that can help them.
“I explain…that’s why we give to the church, who in turn can take care of these people.”
“If you want, give to the church, Salvation Army, St. Patrick’s center, places that can help them.”
“I say this is why we give to charities.”
At least that’s what people say they do to address this social need. St. Louis-based National Center for Parents as Teachers, the largest home visiting program in the nation, is about half-way through its 25th anniversary campaign. It, too, is a charity…one that helps many of the neediest families find parenting support to help them make good choices during their children’s crucial early years of development. About two-thirds of all the families served by Parents as Teachers programs across the nation last year fell into the “high needs” category.
It takes money to train those who do this kind of work and to sustain the programs that serve this needy demographic. Giving USA estimates that $307.65 billion was given in the U.S. in 2008. Only charities in the religious, public-society benefit, and international affairs arenas showed increases in contributions. Education-focused charities saw a decrease of 5.5 percent.
A significant number of Americans do not donate at all because (gasp!) they’ve never been asked.
Consider yourself asked. Would you join me in supporting the work of the National Center for Parents as Teachers with an online gift?
Katya Andresen gave a thought-provoking online presentation today as part of IFC Online’s first international fundraising e-conference. Her session, Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes, looked at some fundamental marketing strategies for attracting supporters and donors to nonprofit causes. Her advice boiled down to three fundamentals:
Know what you’re good at.
Communicate how you’re different.
Explain how you impact your target audience on a personal level.
Innovative? No; basic marketing. What’s thought-provoking about it is why so many of us fail to do it! Why do nonprofits (and for-profits, for that matter) think their end user or target audience wants to know all about the organization? Why do we think we need to tell everything we’re good at (and Parents as Teachers is good at a lot of things!) to everyone? Why is it so hard for us to sit back and listen to what our audience cares about before telling them how we can help?
There’s one job in this economic downturn that will always have job security: mom. Once a mom, always a mom. Granted, salary negotiations may be a bit tricky, but the payback can’t be beat.
Here are a couple of my own personal favorites.
A new study recently took a stab at calculating the worth of a mom’s work. Whether you’re a SAHM (stay-at-home-mom) or you work outside the home, your salary as Mom increased last year, says Salary.com. How much would you estimate?
Yesterday I stopped by the bank. While waiting for the computer to pull up my account, my customer service rep Bryant and I chatted. “Where do you work?” he asked. When I told him National Center for Parents as Teachers he exclaimed, “Our parent educator just came yesterday!” It started us on a longer exchange about kids and parenting.
Bryant’s wife has her doctorate degree and works at the high school level with challenging students. “She really appreciates Parents as Teachers,” Bryant told me. “Because her background is at the other end of the educational spectrum, she’s not as well versed in early development. Despite her degree and her profession, this is all new to her. We’ve both learned a lot from Parents as Teachers.”
I urged him and his wife to tell their stories in the StoryFront form on the Parents as Teachers Web site. It’s just the kind of thing decision-makers need to hear.
You can listen to some of the recorded stories here.
Babies, for all their cuteness, have the potential to wreak havoc on marriages. Within six months of the birth of the first baby there is a ninefold increase in toxic marital conflict, says John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School. In fact, having a baby is a risk factor for behaviors that eventually end in divorce, he says in this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Babies require work (aka parenting). But where does a new parent, or parent-to-be, learn how to parent? Last year more than 250,000 of them learned good parenting practices from Parents as Teachers.
According to Medina, the greatest predictor of academic success is the emotional stability of the household. “You want to get your kid into Harvard? Go home and love your wife.”
Medina was the founding director of the Talaris Research Institute, a Seattle-based research center originally focused on how infants encode and process information at the cognitive, cellular, and molecular levels. He’ll be speaking at the Parents as Teachers annual conference in St. Louis on November 11. Tickets are $40.
According to Jim Gallagher’s column in yesterday’s Post-Dispatch, you can tell a lot about people by what they leave in their repossessed cars: the unopened bank mail, fast food wrappers, ATM receipts documenting multiple withdrawals in a single day. All the things indicative of a disorganized life.
What’s saddest, however, is that not only are these folks have difficulty managing their own finances, but they’re also modeling a stressful, disorganized lifestyle to their children. All too often children’s school books are buried in the remains of these repossessed vehicles, indicating to folks in the banks’ loan departments that these parents weren’t paying attention to their children’s homework.
Fast forward a few years, and the banks are finding themselves repossessing cars from these now-grown children whose parents they had dealt with earlier. Apparently the parents hadn’t taught them good financial habits and no one else was doing it either.
Parents cannot begin to understand the impact they have on their children, say early childhood experts. Developing brains soak up every word, every attitude, every action. So if parents don’t have the skills themselves to create a safe and stable environment for their children, guess what gets passed on to the next generation?
It’s critical for young parents to understand money matters. Personal finance is much more involved than balancing a checkbook. It’s credit and debit cards, consumer loans, savings and investments, budgeting and setting financial goals. Who teaches that today?
A lot of Parents as Teachers parents get this kind of guidance from their parent educators. Money Matters: a young parent’s workbook for finances and the future is one resource teens and other young parents can find in the e-Store at www.parentsasteachers.org. (Look for item #257.)
A while back I blogged about a “wonderful Parents as Teachers weekend” where I learned over pizza with my mother-in-law, Deb, about the successful establishment of the first Parents as Teachers program in Wilson County, Tenn.
Our casual conversation over 4 years ago about the work we both do with children and teen parents (I at the National Center here in St. Louis and she at YouthLinks in Wilson County, Tenn.) flowered into a fabulous collaboration between four different agencies that found a way to mesh together their multiple programs and philosophies to serve the families in their community. The agencies involved are the Lebanon Special School District, Wilson County Schools, Prospect, Inc., and the University of Tennessee Extension, Wilson County.
On a recent visit to Nashville in March, Deb proudly handed me a DVD that the program developed for recruitment … I couldn’t help but share!
More recently, upon editing our registration mailer this week for the Parents as Teachers Conference (slated for November) I was pleased to see that Shelly Barnes from the University of Tennessee Extension will be presenting about their unique Parents as Teachers collaboration. I’ll definitely be in attendance, so Shelly … see you there!
This is the official Parents as Teachers blog authored by Parents as Teachers National Center. It is designed for parent educators, parents, early childhood professionals and anyone who cares to share your love of children. It is a discussion forum, please take a look around, post a comment and enjoy!
