I have been struggling to find a name for parents who go that extra step to help their children learn. I want to differentiate between the teaching that goes on in school and the learning that happens in the home.

Why do I want to do this?

Because I think that parents have a vital role to play in helping children learn. Not only that but I have learned that how a parent helps their child learn is far more important than what a teacher does in the classroom.

I have been a teacher for over 35 year and it has taken me a while to understand just how important parents are in helping children learn. Sure, we teachers always talked about parents being a child’s first teacher, but we didn’t really understand what it meant. I think that most teachers think that a parent’s job is to get their child ready to go to kindergarten and then to make sure that they do their homework.

Well, parents do much more to help children learn and succeed in school, believe me. They set the scene for learning to happen. Without their support children will never reach their full learning potential.

And parents support children’s learning whether or not they are aware of doing it.Every day parents act in ways that help children learn.

Now here is my problem.

I want to bring attention to all the ways that parents help their children succeed in school. I want to separate all the ways parents develop children’s learning skills from the other, more general, aspects of parenting.

Most parents are not trained teachers, so I hesitate to call their everyday supportive actions ‘teaching’. Many of them may never differentiate how they are helping their child learn from regular parenting activities. So how do I come up with a term that describes the part of parenting that supports children’s learning?

The best term I have come up with so far is ‘edu-parenting’.

I would love your comments – and, if you have other suggestions I would love to hear them.