Bio: Mary Gordon has been developing school-based Family Literacy and parenting programs since the early 1980s, and currently administrates Parenting and Family Literacy Programs with the Toronto District School Board. Her classroom-based parenting course, Roots of Empathy, is used throughout the country, and her models and programs have received international recognition.

Family Literacy

Family literacy is the beginning of lifelong literacy. It is the ground zero against which children measure everything else in their lives. Working with families is the most effective way of raising literacy levels. By doing this, we prepare rather than repair. School systems are frantically in repair mode because we haven't prepared children and families. We haven't recognized at a visceral level that it is the family who gives children the attitude; 'I think I can, I think I can'. And without that 'little engine' attitude, those little engines have an uphill battle all their lives. We have to help our children feel that they can do it and want to do it. That doesn't come from teachers in classrooms, it comes from the loving relationships that exist in the home. Our role is to help those relationships. It will take a thousand cups of tea to reach many of our families but that tea will sweeten life.

The experiences of children in the earliest years of life are more predictive of their success than all of the things that we do in the interim, so it's important to get it right from the beginning. The family literacy movement gives us insights into how to help families steer their children. We do this work because families care, more than anybody else, about their children. The family is the absolute cell, the core building block of society, and significant change happens through them.

Family literacy is not about instruction per se. It's about helping families positively influence their children's outcomes with literacy. Our most vulnerable children are the children who live in poverty and those are the families most difficult to reach. If you push a vulnerable family too hard though, you lose them and they don't come back. Children have to show up in schools; families don't have to do anything. If they are social-worked rather than empowered, they won't come back.

Government Policy and Family Literacy

You don't hear the word 'caring' in social policy issues but caring is basic to any society. If we don't care, it's going to be difficult to create social policies that have any real significance.

It is unconscionable in a country with the richness of Canada that there is one child who goes to bed hungry, or one family that cannot buy a book for their child, or one family so exhausted from providing for their children that they don't have the energy to listen to them or speak with them. We need to hear our children's dreams. Children who don't have anyone to listen to their dreams stop dreaming.