What messages do we hear about the parents of today's college students? If you believe the media, you would think parents are wealthy, watching carefully, likely to take over for the student at a moment's notice—and not in a subtle way—in a way that involves calling the president or chancellor and demanding swift action. Those stories attract a lot of attention but describe a very small subset of parents and families. Is it likely that those stories are influencing our perceptions of parents and families? What are the characteristics they are assumed to have based on the way we refer to them? How do our programming efforts and approaches to research convey our assumptions?

Higher education has done well in raising attention about parents, creating parent programs, providing mechanisms for inclusion related to orientation, parent clubs/groups, and parent relations offices, but it is time for a reexamination of how we can better serve the full scope and diversity of today's parents and families. Not all parents are going to call the president or chancellor to intervene on behalf of their student. Not all parents have the resources to be as involved on campus as they would like to be, or they might feel unsure as to how to be more of a presence on campus. And many parents and family members are incredibly involved in key ways that support college students, but those of us in higher education might not see that engagement and falsely assume it does not exist.

What would happen if we expanded our discussion of parental involvement to also include familial engagement? Rather than see parents and families through a deficit lens of what they do not have or offer and assuming a lack of care, what if we were able to see the wealth of abilities, values, and attitudes that family engagement brings to student success through emotional, psychological, or community‐based actions (Baquedano‐Lopez, Alexander, & Hernandez, 2013)? What if our recognition of these contributions leads to new approaches to research and practice that better capture multiple forms of support? Ultimately, we hope that these new perspectives will provide new avenues for practitioners, researchers, families, and students to work together, acknowledging the diverse resources that each can offer.

What Do We Know About the Benefits of Parent and Family Engagement?

Parents and families are engaged in their children's educational journeys in many ways, and starting well before the college years, including incorporating college‐going practices and discussions into everyday household interactions and learning about college resources from multiple family members (Kiyama, 2010, 2011). Engagement and involvement moving toward and through college is important to consider. Research has found evidence of the benefits of families in supporting college students, focusing mostly on the role of parents (Wartman & Savage, 2008). This monograph reimagines parental and familial engagement by considering how our approaches might look different when inclusive of diverse families (Kiyama & Harper, 2015).

What Are Some Innovative and Effective Principles and Practices Related to Family Engagement?

Seeing parents and families as key stakeholders and partners in the college‐going process and making sure they are part of the institution's mission is a necessary underlying value when creating programs and services (Ward‐Roof, Heaton, & Coburn, 2008). Many programs across the country are developing strategies to engage parents from orientation to graduation and beyond through alumni development efforts. Regularly assessing the needs and composition of the parents and families being served can help inform efforts, which might include a presence in high schools and community spaces, sending information home and posting resources online, including events for siblings and grandparents, offering workshops or events in languages other than English, explaining what campus offices do or offer and what certain policies mean, and encouraging parents and families to ask questions (perhaps using one centralized office who can refer out as needed). Campus constituents and local community members can collaborate to better serve the needs of parents and families so that strategies can be developed to foster and support what parents are already doing well and address any institutional or familial gaps in resources, support, or information.

What Questions Can Faculty, Student Affairs Practitioners, and Other Institutional Actors Ask Themselves?

It is important that institutional actors reflect on the focus of parent and family programming. Does such programming extend beyond parents to include families—and perhaps a generous definition of families that can include nonbiological connections? If certain parents or families are not partaking in certain campus events or services, ask why and consider participation barriers rather than assuming a lack of interest. Rather than limiting the scope to college, are there ways of accounting for long‐term trajectory of students by developing relationships with families prior to college? In examining assumptions, programs, practices, messaging strategies, and/or research approaches, are there opportunities to become more inclusive of family configurations and needs? How can issues such as length and cost of programs, child care, language, and distance from home be considered? If students are unable or unwilling to include parents or family members in their college experience, how might our messages and actions support those situations and perhaps find other ways of expanding the students’ support network?

Our strategies for serving the parents and families of today's college students should be as diverse as the students. There are many opportunities to engage families throughout students’ educational trajectories. We highlight promising practices in place across the country in the hopes that they might be applied more broadly to other campuses and modified as needed. This monograph highlights many of the ways in which parents and families contribute to students’ educational success and the ways in which institutions, students, and parents can partner to support all involved. In doing so, we offer an expansion of terminology and frameworks for considering the diverse engagement of families in an effort to cultivate enhanced success for today's college students.

Confession: I am the parent of a daughter who is in high school and who will be heading off to college soon. Confession: I am a relatively engaged parent—I have never missed a parent/teacher conference; I know all of her teachers (and they know me); I am a member of her school's site council; I keep up with what is happening in the school and in the school district; and I actively engage with my daughter about issues related to her academic and social pursuits. Confession: I talk to my daughter a lot—in person and via electronic means. Confession: I am likely to continue that kind of engagement when my daughter goes off to college. Confession: My relationship with my daughter is a healthy one but is also clearly a product of our background (education, socioeconomic status, geography, culture) as well as a product of the times (the ready and easy access to media of communication). Confession: I am the parent who is widely represented in today's research literature and the popular press who isn't fully going to just let her daughter go—even when she leaves for college. Does that make me a helicopter parent? Am I going to be one of those parents who stifles her daughter's growth and development? Is she too dependent on me? Am I too dependent on her? Further, how is my approach to parenting related to the choices made by others? What about our relationship is a cultural norm and what about it is particular to who we are and the kind of relationship we have developed? These are all questions that I asked myself as I read and was informed by this monograph on Parent and Family Engagement in Higher Education by Judy Marquez Kiyama and Casandra E. Harper.

This monograph is an engaging piece that provides meaningful and well‐summarized information on the challenges and assets brought to the college‐going process by families—broadly defined. This monograph is written about how colleges and universities can foster relationships with people like me—those whose social and cultural capital make them likely to be well represented in higher education, but also potentially portrayed as being too involved. At the same time, it is also written about those who have been consistently negatively portrayed because of their lack of social capital, college‐going histories of their own, and material resources. The monograph makes a strong argument for the need for colleges as well as primary/secondary systems to rethink their approaches to family involvement/engagement, and to renew their efforts to be more family inclusive, especially for those who have not been well served in higher education.

The monograph represents a continuation of the conversation started by Wartman and Savage in their 2008 ASHE Higher Education Report entitled Parental Involvement in Higher Education. This monograph builds on the initial monograph and offers a thorough review of the literature on parents and families, with attention to differential experiences by race, class, first‐generation college student status, and other characteristics. One of its contributions is that it offers a broader definition of family than is typically used in the literature. The monograph also offers information about family involvement that spans kindergarten through postsecondary education. This latter approach is useful because the K–12 literature is actually more expansive about how to include the parents of diverse families than is the literature on higher education. The monograph is replete with practical advice for institutions to consider—from including families into recruitment and orientations to helping parents support their children while not inhibiting their developmental growth. The monograph offers standards, models, and best practices when engaging with parents and families and reviews both challenges and opportunities for institutions to consider when working with families.

This monograph will be of interest to several audiences. Parents, faculty members, administrators, and higher education scholars will all find this monograph compelling. Those who work with new college students and their families will find this particularly illuminating. As I confessed at the beginning of this foreword, my connection to the monograph was largely personal—it raised lots of interesting questions about how I as an engaged family member have responded to my daughter's educational experiences in K–12 and how I plan to respond when she goes off to college. I was able to connect to the material on this level as well as through my lens as a higher education scholar. Any monograph that can do this—be read on more than one level—is a worthy addition to the field. I am pleased to present this monograph as part of our series and believe it makes an important contribution to the field.

Lisa E. Wolf‐Wendel
Kelly Ward
Series Editors

The authors wish to thank Katherine Lynk Wartman and Marjorie Savage for their contribution of the 2008 ASHE Monograph: Parental Involvement in Higher Education: Understanding the Relationship Among Students, Parents, and the Institution. Their work offered an important foundation from which scholars can expand their research and practice when working with parents and families.

The current monograph was written in collaboration with Delma Ramos, doctoral student at the University of Denver; David Aguayo, doctoral student at the University of Missouri; Laura A. Page, doctoral student at the University of Missouri; and Kathy Adams Riester, Associate Dean of Students and Director, Parents & Family Association/Campus Safety Coordinator at the University of Arizona. David Aguayo contributed significantly to the chapter on family engagement in the kindergarten through high school years and family engagement and involvement in college. Delma Ramos contributed significantly to the chapter on familial engagement in the transition to college and family engagement in college. Laura A. Page and Kathy Adams Riester wrote the chapter on shifting the paradigm, which examines family partnerships from a practitioner perspective.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not also acknowledge our own families. Their multiple forms of engagement, support, and encouragement throughout our own educational pathways have guided our work on the role of parents and families in higher education.