When families and early childhood education and care (ECEC) staff interact effectively, children can experience improved socio-cognitive outcomes. Family engagement in ECEC can take various forms, including communication about children’s participation in activities, exchanges about how parents can support their children’s development at home, and parental involvement in ECEC centres’ decision-making and operations. Combining different types of family engagement could help ECEC centres to build a more positive relationship with families. However, in some countries, it is not always the norm for ECEC centres to implement multi-faceted family engagement practices. Furthermore, some family engagement practices are more commonly established in centres serving more children from disadvantaged homes in certain countries, but there is no clear pattern suggesting that there are systematic efforts to strengthen relationships between ECEC centres and families in situations of disadvantage. Care needs to be taken to ensure that vulnerable families are effectively engaged in ECEC, or efforts to improve parental engagement could end up benefitting certain families only.
