The Center for Universal of Education at Brookings has developed and is piloting a set of conversation starter tools. It is a follow-up to the work done on the Playbook for Family-School Engagement that we were providing inspiration for and our Director contributed to it as a reviewer. During the summer and autumn of 2023, our researchers are piloting the tools in Hungary, Kazakhstan and the Netherlands.

The Conversation Starter Tools (CSTs) are a set of tools developed by CUE to guide school, jurisdiction, or community teams in facilitating data-informed conversations where they can talk about their beliefs on education and build relational trust. The Conversation Starter Tools guide teams in identifying educators’, parents’, and students’ beliefs on the purpose of school and what makes a quality education; valued pedagogical approaches; and level of trust, alignment, and engagement. The surveys data can vary depending on demographics, such as by gender and education levels of parents. These surveys do not judge or assess schools, but rather help teams understand beliefs and experiences to help inform more participatory and inclusive approaches to promoting family engagement.

For teams wanting to facilitate data-informed conversations, the process can be summarized in 4 steps:

1. Contextualize: This step involves determining why teams want to conduct surveys (purpose), who the respondents are (demographics + literacy levels), how the surveys will be administered (remote, in-person, hybrid), what needs to be modified for context (especially ensuring the surveys are translated into relevant languages), and whether findings will be used for research purposes.
2. Survey: Surveys are administered to parents, teachers, and students (for use with students over 14 years) either in-person or remotely. Data is analyzed and visualized.
3. Share data & discuss: Teams share findings from the surveys with respondent groups. Conversations are then organized among various actors to discuss the findings of the survey and their reflections and takeaways.
4. Strategize: Conversations are used to guide teams in building strategies to increase family engagement in their communities.

The current research is testing how the tools work in different schools and school systems and also how to translate various notions to local languages for better understanding. You can find the American version here: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Conversation_Starter_Tools_eng_FINAL.pdf

We will share our research outcomes with you towards the end of the year.

The Annual Conference of the European Education Policy Network on Teachers and School Leaders (EEPN) was held in Trim, Ireland on 3-4 November 2022. Nearly 80 participants from all over Europe had the opportunity to discuss the complex topic of the year teachers and school leaders towards a sustainable whole school approach for quality and inclusive education based on the research done and the policy recommendations published. Parents International, as a partner in the Policy Network was present at the event and participated at the discussions. We are proud that our work has been an inspiration and included in this year’s research again.

The conference covered the following topics:

• Teachers’ and school leaders’ competences and support for effective blended learning
• A whole school support and networking to ensure school success for all
• A whole school approach for sustainable development, with a particular focus on the role and competences of school leaders to support the implementation of it
• Schools as learning communities to support teachers’ and school leaders’ professional learning and well-being

Michael Teutsch, the Head of the Schools and Multilingualism Unit of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture emphasised the importance of research around teachers and their appreciation for the work of the Network in his opening video message. It was followed by a thought-provoking keynote presentation by Harold Hislop, the recently retired Chief Inspector of Ireland who gave a very interesting and in-depth presentation of the Irish school system’s state of the art.

Peter Kelly (European Education Research Association, Plymouth University) summarised the overarching messages of the four research papers covering the topics of the conference. He emphasised the importance of building community in schools, including school leaders, teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents and external stakeholders in making quality, inclusive education a reality. The second and closely linked message was about the need for active participation of all these players. The third key element is the elaboration of the professionals in charge, namely school leaders and teachers in it.

The EEPN policy recommendations were debated in a lively interactive plenary session conducted by the European Education Trade Union Confederation and the European Federation of Education Employers.

On the second day of the conference, the participants had the opportunity to share their views and own practice related to the four research topics in workshops. The conference also provided an opportunity for EEPN partners – some of them ESHA members – to discuss various follow-up activities they are planning once the EEPN project funding period is over.

Parents International was contacted by the young public association Senimen Bolashaq in July 2022 to start developing a cooperation between the two organisations. They invited us to visit them in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. Our Director, Eszter Salamon could only spend three days there between 15-17 August due to our already busy schedule, but this short time was enough to learn about the amazing work the organisation has done in a little over a year of its existence, to plant seeds of active cooperation, and also to meet national and municipal policy makers.

As part of the visit, the leaders of Senimen Bolashaq and Parents International met the representatives of the German Embassy that can be instrumental in arranging Schengen visas for people representing the association as entry can be a major obstacle of study visits or even project meetings. A meeting with the Representation of the European Union in Kazakhstan offered a good opportunity to explore the EU-funding opportunities for projects carried out in Kazakhstan, using the European expertise and experience of Parents International.

An especially fruitful visit was at the Minister of Science and Higher Education, Sayasat Nurbek. Kazakhstan is facing a shortage of teachers and schools due to their baby-boom, and we have discussed ways we could cooperate in developing initial teacher training curricula that ensures quality training for about 100.000 new teachers in the very near future. We have offered our help in developing specific modules on parental engagement, and also in education leadership with special focus on learning leadership, parental engagement and child participation. Another main challenge in the country is to raise science literacy levels. We have introduced the Minister the PHERECLOS approach and tools, and he immediately decided to incentivise universities to pursue their third, societal mission.

There was a meeting held with the Municipality of Nur-Sultan, where we have learnt about the strong relationship between the city and the local branch of the organisation.

Before the visit, we had jointly reviewed our existing programmes, tools and projects, and picked out a few with exploitation potential. On the last day of the visit, Senimen Bolashaq hosted a conference with over 600 people working with parents all over the country focusing on conscious parenting. We had the opportunity to present and explore the local implementation potential in-

• Parent’R’Us to help build a system of parent-to-parent support based on this successful mentoring model,
• ParENTrepreneurs as a means to support parents in their everyday practice as well as in developing their own skills for 21^st century parenting,
• ELPIDA, Parenting Together and the upcoming SILENT to cater for the extra empowerment needs of parent of children with disabilities,
• SAILS as raising children in the digital age is also a major concern in Kazakhstan – while the acknowledgement of child agency seems to be at a higher level than in most Western countries -, thus our unique risk mitigation approach has been very well received,
• PHERECLOS that offers tools for raising science engagement and literacy, and with regards to that our Advocacy “Adventure Book” for educators was specifically highlighted

to teachers, school leaders, psychologists and parent leaders.

During the discussions, the need for at least Russian versions of the tools and publications has arisen (as Kazakh people generally speak Russian, too). This can be relatively easily achieved as the AI translation tool used by Parents International includes Russian and Senimen Bolashaq has the capacity to do the necessary editing work.

We also had the opportunity to understand how each organisation operates, with Senimen Bolashaq being based on funding from the for-profit sector (mainly a handful of generous businessmen who understood that investing in parents and through them children ensures the future of their companies, too) and being built in a top-down way. We hope to soon have the opportunity for another visit and seeing more of their work outside of the capital.

Last but not least, the conference offered an opportunity to learn about some local and regional approaches that we have found amazing. While the work of Shalva A. Amonashvili on Humane Pedagogy, or Abaj Kunanbajuli, whose philosophy is the groundwork for thinking in Kazakhstan may be less known in the West, their messages about child agency, the need for parents to respect the child, the harm done by punishment, and the need to base parenting on love resonate with what Western thinkers and experts have said. It was amazing to hear nearly exactly the same words that Alison Gopnik has written about the gardener and the carpenter parent – but from the writings of a Georgian scholar with a totally different, oriental starting point. We hope the collaboration between Senimen Bolashaq and Parents International will support mutual learning of educators in Central Asia and other parts of the world. Senimen Bolashaq is joining our Parent Summit in Amsterdam and hopefully also join us by then as a member. The Memorandum of Understanding signed during the visit gives a good starting point for this.

The ParENTrepreneurs project officially ended on 30 April 2022 and we have submitted the final report at the end of June. A project ending means that most development activities are done, although in ParENTrepreneurs we will keep enriching the Social Learning Platform. At the same time, you can become a certified ParENTrepreneur anytime, if you do the training in English, Finnish, French, Italian or Spanish. The training material is already being used to train more parents as well as teachers in entrepreneurial education. This has been a highly successful project amidst the challenges of restrictions, lockdowns, uncertainties and a lot of fear that makes the achievement even more a reason to celebrate.

ParENTrepreneurs in short:

The ParENTrepreneurs partnership has developed 5 Intellectual outputs with the active collaboration and contribution of all partners:

• IO1 Competence Framework for parentrepreneurs which includes an assessment of the needs and the identification of the skills to be developed to enhance the capacity of the main target group. It is based onand is aligned to the reference of EntreComp Framework;

• IO2 Training package for parentrepreneurs including 6 modules clearly linked to the Competence Framework.
• IO3 Social Learning Platform an open source e-learning and networking platform. It contains the self-paced learning, assessment modules that lead to certification as well as resources for further self-development ideas/tools for everyday parenting practice.
• IO4 Parents To Parents manual that provides complementary information to the IO2 course to allow parents trained to train other parents (as well as other trainers) to successfully organise their own trainingsand activate the peer-to-peer scheme.
• IO5 Guide to validation and recognition of the program. The Guide contains information on the assessment process developed for training participants. targetting employers and policy makers.
  All IOs were produced in English orginial and translated to Finnish, French, Italian and Spanish. Some IOs have also been translated to Dutch as an extra.

In order to develop these intellectual outputs, we held 3 in-person transnational meetings (in Matera, Amsterdam and Helsinki) as well as an online one. The partnership regularly met for monthly coordination calls in betweenmeetings.
During the development of IO1, the partners engaged key stakeholders including entrepreneurship educators, parent leaders and researchers in the validation of the framework developed.
For the testing and refining of the training framework, pilot trainings were carried out in a syncronous online format in Finland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, and in-person in the Netherlands, Belgium,Spain and Hungary (the two last ones were extra).
In an international train-the-trainers event, future ParENTrepreneurs trainers were trained in Amsterdam.
All partners organised multiplier events to engage those who will potentially implement the project outcomes after the project’s lifetime.
All partners were very active in creating content for dissemination and disseminating the project.
Rigorous monitoring processes were implemented throughout the project to ensure quality.

The consultation on IO1 engaged over 100 experts from 18 countries. Professional educators, parents and parent leaders, policy makers, (education) project managers, and researchers engaged in theconsultation. An online survey collected quantitative and qualitative data on the draft framework. It was aimed at helping to develop a tool that is both scientifically sound as well as user-friendly. The survey sought to ensure that the presentation of the comprehensive parENTrepreneurs framework remains accessible to parents and parent leaders as well as other audiences and sense-check the entrepreneurialcompetences at different age levels.
151 participants were engaged in the pilot trainings at national level. In the in-person trainings, the children of participants were also engaged via organised activities held paralel to the trainings so that theparents did not have child caring obligations during the sessions.
20 people participated at the international training (2 participants could only join for 60% of the training, and one guest speaker joined for some of the training session, too). About half of the participant werepreviously trained online by partners.
140 people participated at the Multiplier events.

Child Up Final Conference in Brussels 9-10 June 2022 – what we had to say as a member of their International Stakeholder Committee

The Child Up project was dealing with child agency and especially the agency and recognition of agency in the case of migrant children. It is a crucial element of their inclusion. We were invited to contribute on practice related to this topic. The input from our Director, Eszter Salamon was highlighting on some aspects we rarely consider, and also on how engaging parents can support child agency.

When it comes to adults understanding that children have agency and supporting its development, it is worth having a historic look at how much adults have trusted children that they are capable of doing things. Jesper Juul, the renown and recently deceased family therapist from Denmark raises this issue in his last book, Leitwölfe Sein (Be the leader of a pack of wolves) that has not yet been published in English. In the book, he calls parents to behave like the leader of a pack of wolves normally behave: set directions, allow all members to fight for their status, but support the weaker ones. However, he also mentions that the later – the key to child agency – is a moving target, the view of parents on this has been changing over time. The child rights movement has tried to make all adults understand that children are rights holders and have agency on their own right. Juul makes a link between this and the women’s rights movement. In 2022, it is difficult to believe that even a few decades ago women were not allowed to open their own bank account without their father or husband signing it off in some European countries, and we still don’t see the full emancipation of women. And the suffragettes had chained themselves to tailings about a century ago. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is only a little over 30 years ago, and children – especially younger children – are unlikely to start a juvenile suffragettes-like movement. So it is up to the adults in their lives, especially their parents, to fight for the recognition of their agency. Hopefully, in the case of children it will not take more than a hundred years, but in this area again we are very far from being there.

At the same time, American parenting approaches are becoming popular in Europe. The USA, being the only country in the World that has not and most probably will not ratify the UNCRC, does not believe in child agency. Parents can even be punished for what the Americans call free range parenting, parenting that believes in child agency. These ideas have first entered Europe at about the same time as the child rights movement started. As a result, there is already a younger adult generation, becoming parents or already young parents these days, who were not as free as children 40-50 years ago where. It seems that the generation of European parents who were born during or shortly after the WWII still understood that children are capable of a lot of things and can be trusted.

When families arrive from outside of Europe, their children often have experiences with the recognition of and support for their agency. They are often trusted much more than their European-born counterparts. So, why is it different at school? Why a whole large-scale project was built on supporting the agency of these children at school?

We believe that it is not a migrant issue, but rather an amalgam of different elements that are more prevalent in certain migrant children – not one-by-one, but present at the same time: social disadvantage, linguistic register, age and considering the multiple inclusion needs of the child. We say certain, because the whole picture changes if you don’t only focus on children who are third country national, but also on EU migrants. Why do we face different challenges in education when we look at for example Italian or Polish migrant children in the Netherland than when it is Syrian or – to stay within Europe – Ukrainian migrants.

There is a good reason why nearly all programmes that are designed to support the inclusion of Roma children in Eastern Europe work brilliantly for “migrant children”, more precisely for children who come from similarly difficult backgrounds, from challenging socio-economical situations, often have parents who have low education levels and fear from the “authority” school may have over them.

We have also experienced that the case is also similar when it comes to language. Teachers – while totally capable of adjusting their linguistic register to children – struggle with communicating with parents of these children. The reason is more often the linguistic register than the total lack of language skills. Again, what works in Roma inclusion, can also work in the case of migrant parents. Often, there is also a lack of related cultural knowledge on the teachers’ side, this is why our Parent’R’Us programme has been so successful – parents belonging to these groups, be it Roma or migrants – building the capacity of both their peers and that of teachers.

Linguistic register is a crucial question in designing classroom activities. A very important finding of research that our colleague, Luca László has emphasised often, shows that tackling children as “migrants” may mislead you in analysing learning outcomes as it easily leads to mixing up lower learning outcomes as a result of a child struggling with the vocabulary of Mathematics with having lower skills levels in Mathematics. A migrant child may already find it easy to communicate with their peers on everyday topics in the language of instruction, but may not have the vocabulary to express themselves in the language of certain subjects. Allowing children to work in the language they feel comfortable with leads to much better school results – and AI translation is already at a very high level, so teachers can easily understand what they are producing.

Very often migrant children are considered as one block, but just in the case of any other children, their agency is developing over time, thus the age of children is an important factor in considering their agency. In this, parents are again crucial as in the case of young children, especially with yet limited capacity, they are the ones who can facilitate agency. It starts really early. We know from research that even 2-year-olds are capable of establishing rules in their playgroup and also of keeping to these rules. This is a crucial moment as it is the age (sometime between 18 months and 2 years) when self-awareness is born.

One last element that is often neglected when a project or programme is tackling migrant children en bloc. Being migrant is just one factor in the needs of a child. If you don’t remember that a migrant child may also e.g. be physically disabled, dyslexic or especially talented in Mathematics, and you include them in a “migrant” programme, the needs of the child will not be met.

Thus it is crucial to have a holistic approach to child agency that is built on considering the multiple inclusion needs of each child, be them migrants coming from third countries or anybody else. What the Child Up project calls “hybrid integration” is a totally unnecessary discrimination of migrant children or just what we mean by inclusion. As inclusion is a term that we have been trying to make policy makers and practitioners understand and implement for a long time, and there are improvements, introducing a new, difficult-to-understand and mostly superfluous term may do more harm than good.

Safer Internet Day 2022 message by Parents International

Safer Internet Day is observed on the 8 February each year, and Parents International is a long-term supporter of the initiative constantly calling attention to a balance of rights and actions, and the crucial role of parents in ensuring it. In 2022 Safer Internet Day is again about “Together for a better internet. The United Kingdom has decided to focus on using technology responsibly, respectfully, critically, and creatively, a very timely initiative. Our annual message is closely connected to this.

In 2021, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted a General Comment concerning children’s rights in digital environments. In this document, it is highlighted that all children’s rights should be given due weight, thus including the right to seek, receive and impart information, not only that to be protected from harm. In no particular order of importance, the following rights are, or should be, most impactful in the online environment:

• The right to free expression (Article 13).
• The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 14).
• The right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly (Article 15).
• The right to privacy (Article 16).
• The right to access to information (Article 17).
• The right to education (Article 28).
• The right to leisure, play, and culture (Article 31).
• The right to protection from economic, sexual, and other types of exploitation (Articles 32, 34, and 36, respectively).

Parents as primary educators of their children, and as primary protectors and enablers of children’s rights play a very important role in finding the right balance. According to recent research (EEPN 2021, OECD 2021, CoE 2021), in general parents are already better suited for this than professional educators. With the teaching force becoming older in most parts of the world, a growing percentage of parents are already ‘digital natives’, have been using digital technologies extensively all their lives. This needs a rethinking and shifting roles with teachers and other professional educators becoming lifelong learners learning from parents as well as other sources. Parents are present and wish to be engaged, this has also been proven by research (Brookings 2021, IPA 2021), thus it seems obvious for schools to become open to the opportunity of learning from parents.

For the much-needed respect, responsibility, critical thinking and creativity, educators – both professionals and parents – need to develop their skills in these fields. Research clearly shows that professional educators tend to be less entrepreneurial than people in other professions – meaning that parents are likely to be more creative, resilient, ready to take initiative, to think outside of the box or be collaborative. It is also clear from research, that teachers are less able to think critically, namely eg. to differentiate between fact an opinion, than the general population, the parents.

However, parents still need support in further developing these competences, and our recent research shows that there are very few initiatives targeting parents that implement the balanced risk mitigation approach instead of pushing for risk prevention at the cost of all other rights – and most of them come from industry. Parents International has joined the SAILS consortium to develop resources for parents of school-aged children, after being part of a similar initiative targeting parents of very young children with a similar approach (DigiLitEy). The resource will soon be available for all.

To foster neighbouring skills and competences, we have also been active in and promoted entrepreneurial parenting. On Safer Internet Day 2022, our ParENTrepreneurs trainings and collaborative learning platform are more topical than ever.

We are calling all other stakeholders and Safer Internet Day supporters to promote these tools and to use parents as a resource for their own learning for an internet where we really can be together in an unrestricted, but still safe way.

Parents International has organised three face-to-face pilots of the ParENTrepreneurs Training to ensure that the programme we developed in the project consortium works in different contexts. As other partners have only been able to pilot online, this was crucial for the project’s success. The pilots took place in October and the beginning of November in Hungary, the Netherlands (this training was the only one foreseen) and Spain.

Netherlands

The ParENTrepreneurs pilot in the Netherlands was the first complete in-person pilot of the training. The pilot had been postponed in order to be delivered according to the application. The application had also contemplated an international pilot in advance of national pilots but in some cases this had not been possible owing to the covid related delays.. The pilot was delivered implementing the training manual. The training was delivered in English to a group of parents from various backgrounds and nationalities, with children enrolled in kindergarten or school in the country.

The training was offered on three consecutive Saturdays between the middle and the end of October with two modules delivered each day. Since there was much more interest and demand beyond the available 20 places, a second training is planned after the international training, in the Spring or early Summer 2022. Childcare and activities for children were offered alongside the training.

The 20 people enrolled in the pilot participated in all activities and filled the evaluation forms for each module separately. Overall, we can say that the training was very well received, the parents found it very useful, enjoyable and appropriate to cater for their needs.

Hungary

The ParENTrepreneurs pilot in Hungary was an extra pilot of the training in an effort to have f2f pilots in at least 3 country contexts. The pilot was delivered and completed following the training manual. It was delivered in Hungarian, but using the English training materials to a group of parents who are all active parent leaders at different levels. It was held over the long weekend at the end of October and 1 November 2021 with two modules delivered each day.

Childcare and activities for children were offered alongside the training. The 9 people enrolled in the pilot participated in all activities and filled the evaluation at the end of the training for the whole experience. Overall, we can say that the training was very well received, the parents found it very useful, enjoyable and appropriate to cater for their needs. Linguistic barriers using the English training material were present, but addressed fairly easily.

Spain

The ParENTrepreneurs pilot in Spain, Catalonia was an extra pilot of the training in an effort to have f2f pilots in at least 3 country contexts. The pilot was implemented and followed the training manual completely. The pilot was delivered in Spanish to a group of parents who are all active parent leaders at different levels, but the evaluation was done in English. The training was held over the long weekend at the end of October and 1 November 2021 with two modules delivered each day.

Childcare and activities for children were provided alongside the training. The 8 people enrolled in the pilot participated in all activities and completedthe evaluation forms for the training as a whole once. Overall, we can say that the training was very well received, the parents found it very useful, enjoyable and appropriate to their needs.

The ParENTreperenurs trainings have proven to be relevant and interesting for parents with different cultural and national backgrounds, different age groups and also for parents of younger and older children alike. Most of the topics are easy-to-link to everyday parenting challenges. Being entrepreneurial in everyday life is a relatively unique concept for parents in this country context. Most of the topics are easy-to-link to everyday parenting challenges. The training was given a very good evaluation by participants with only a few recommendations for refining it.

Parents International partnered with the COVIDEA initiative to present the #NewEducatioDeal at the Fundamental Rights Forum that was held mostly online. The session we conducted was entitled A new education deal after Covid-19.

Access to quality education is a fundamental right also enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG4). The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of digital technology, but also revealed shortcomings related to connectivity, privacy and other issues. Moreover, the pandemic as well as the ongoing climate crisis make clear that there is a need for a shift from knowledge accumulation to character, judgement and resilience building. This session presents two mutually supportive education reform initiatives, the New Education Deal promoted by Parents International and COVIDEA-The COVID Education Alliance respectively.

In the session the research and call for action in our #NewEducationDeal initiative were presented together with the key elements of the COVIDEA Primer Parents International is supporting.

If you missed the session, the recording it available – the only advantage of online events – here.

International Day of Families 2021 message by Parents International

A year ago, Parents international published a global action plan for the post-covid era. Although in many countries, restrictions are still in place, we are working even harder on going back to our old normal with some changes that benefit our children more. As every year, we celebrate the International Day of Families on 15 May that now focuses on the well-being of families and the impact of new technologies on this. The United Nations has also acknowledged in its annual message the need for governments to shift their focus to empowering parents, the primary educators of their children. Thus, we have even more reason to celebrate this important day in 2021 hoping that the approach we have been promoting, focusing on parents first and foremost will become mainstream in policy and practice. We are using this opportunity to highlight some achievements and also to call the attention to some challenges that need our attention as well as the attention of policy makers in the coming years.

The focus on new technologies and their impact on families’ well-being is accompanied by another important act by the United Nations. General Comment No. 25 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has just been published. This General Comment is a major step in acknowledging child rights in the online world, finally moving in the direction Parents International has advocated for many years. The document stops focusing on the risks only, and highlights children’s civil rights and freedoms, including rights to privacy, non-discrimination, peaceful assembly, education, play and weights them against the right to protection. It also highlights very clearly the rights and duties of parents in this field being primarily responsible for protecting all these rights as well as providing supportive guidance. This is a major step, and we at Parents International are proud we were contributors to this General Comment.

Digital technologies became part of daily life for millions of families more than they had been before lockdowns and school closures although there are huge inequalities in access to technology and services. As we have seen from research done at various points of the past more than a year, families clearly see the benefits of using them, but are also very careful to see a healthy balance between traditional and digital means in education, communication, work, play, and other fields of life. It has also become clear that well-being largely depends on developing various competences of both children and adults – parents and professionals alike -, for example critical thinking, active participation, collaboration, self-care, resilience and civic activism if necessary. These are the areas that initiatives referenced by the UN annual message should focus.

Parents International is ready to share our knowledge, experience and methodologies for trainings, coaching and mentoring by professionals as well as peers who also need to be empowered for that, while we are eager to learn from others. As part of fulfilling our call for action #ParentsFirst – #NewEducationDeal we have continued developing trainings for parents and for professionals working with them. We believe – contrary to what the UN message is implying – that especially for parents with challenging backgrounds there must be ways of improving their parenting skills in face-to-face rather than online environments, while the benefits of digital technologies can still be exploited to a certain extent. We still need to focus on training the professionals who can then in turn train and empower hundreds or thousands of parents each. In this spirit, during the last year we have partnered up with various initiatives and institutions from India to Europe, from Jordan to the United States of America, and will continue to widen this network. One of our partners, the HundrED community is currently evaluating parenting support initiatives, and we are proud to be on the expert jury for that. We have also teamed up with UN experts and subsequently digital technology providers for better education provisions. We have pledged for putting parenting skills in the limelight not only at international days and similar initiatives, but also by showing the multitude of them and their value even for the labour market.

In the past year, we have highlighted various areas where parents were left alone and governments – as well as other branches of power – have miserably failed. It is high time for centres of power to evaluate, ask for forgiveness, and start collaborating with and relying on parents. On the International Day of Families 2021, we are asking governments, intergovernmental institutions, school leaders, teachers, professionals and also the general public to acknowledge that parents are key to a future for our children that they enjoy at the highest level of well-being possible.

Children’s mental health has been jeopardised more than ever in this last one year, and the internet is very much to be blamed for this – but probably not in ways you would first assume. Parents and carers are as much guilty of making our children the victims of pandemic propaganda as teachers and other professionals. While there is a need for a wider coalition to prevent mass and social media from becoming scaremongers of massive proportions ever again, being a parents’ organisation our duty on Safer Internet Day is to highlight the need for parents and carers to be supported in order to become critical thinkers and thus enable them to protect children if anything like this ever happens again in the future. 2020 has shown us that we need to find ways of making down-to-earth, often undereducated people’s voices heard to counterbalance harms caused by messages spreading on the internet.

Child psychiatrists[i] have called the attention of the public to an unprecedented number of acute cases filling specialised hospital wards all over Europe. Many countries are reporting a dramatic increase in child suicide[ii] and PTSD[iii] is becoming a condition for large numbers of children. This is due to children being prevented from normal social life as much as the mantra of children being “granny killers” and making them pathologically afraid of a virus of nearly zero danger to them. While scientific evidence[iv] clearly shows that children neither need to be prevented from playing together, nor have a role in spreading the Covid-19 virus to the elderly, mass media was pushing messages that were contrary to facts.

Critical thinking is a core competence defined in the LifeComp[v] published by the European Union as “assessment of information and arguments to support reasoned conclusions and develop innovative solutions”. Other definitions include “Critical thinking is the act of analysing facts to understand a problem or topic thoroughly” and “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analysing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” The Council of Europe’s active citizenship framework directly links critical thinking to personal responsibility that is also a responsibility of parents for the minors they raise.

Critical thinking includes identification of prejudice, bias, propaganda, self-deception, distortion, misinformation, and this was a nearly impossible task for many in the past year, and there are very good reasons for this. As described by Nobel Prize winning social psychologists Daniel Kahneman[vi] and Richard Thaler[vii], people tend to think unilaterally and highly overestimate dangers of events pushed in their face all the time. It happens with plane crashes, terror attacks, earthquakes, floods as well as the coronavirus. And internet algorithms prioritising content you have already clicked on are amplifying this effect.

While it is a difficult task, professionals are highly responsible for the lack of critical thinking and increasing the effect of scaremongering by media. Nearly all activities of Parents International have been aiming for enabling professionals to support parents in their role better, but we may need to rethink. In the past months, the strongest promoters of child rights and common sense have been people with low levels of education and a very strong root in reality.

On this Safer Internet Day, we may need to rethink who is empowering whom and start appreciating all those parents who were able to prevent their children from harm as much as possible since the beginning of 2020. They were doing it in a virtual and physical environment taking its toll on them as well with jobs being lost, income becoming scarce, schools closing and requiring parents to teach their children, regular health care becoming unavailable and scaremongering impacting them as much as their children. We would like to take this opportunity to applaud them and to start exploring ways of mainstreaming their down-to-earth approach for protecting children’s mental health and well-being in one of the most difficult periods for parents and children all over world. At the same time, it is also high time to make mass online media and social network algorithms accountable for their actions.

[i]  https://www.kleinezeitung.at/international/corona/5928381/?fbclid=IwAR3xTr781BGne_OQA5BycFdbeB2O1m4cRrVqn0Y5v7SuKRr5uFjkCp6utUk

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/new-findings-children-mental-health-covid-19

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32404219/

[ii] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/02/962060105/child-psychiatrists-warn-that-the-pandemic-may-be-driving-up-kids-suicide-risk?t=1612779690444

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7500342/

https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/16/pediatricssuicidestudy121620

[iii] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-020-01191-4

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-53097289

[iv] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02973-3

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30927-0/fulltext

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7311007/

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/146/2/e2020004879

https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.21.2000903;?crawler=true

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apa.15371

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1825/6024998

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf

https://www.pasteur.fr/en/press-area/press-documents/covid-19-primary-schools-no-significant-transmission-among-children-students-teachers

[v] https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/lifecomp-european-framework-personal-social-and-learning-learn-key-competence

[vi] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow

[vii] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26530355-misbehaving