Effective communication between early childcare professionals and parents is important to encourage parental involvement, and to improve the success of children. Parents have busy home and work lives, so staying connected with them on a consistent basis can be a challenge. Thanks to advances in technology, administrators and teachers can use the Internet to provide a means of reliable, accessible, and convenient communication with parents.

The “to do list” of parents is never-ending. Not only do they work hard all day, they fight traffic to get home, prepare dinner, help older children with homework, chauffer the kids to little league, give younger children baths, do laundry, clean the house. . . you get the idea. When you have this much action in your day, newsletters and other handouts can easily get misplaced or forgotten.

When you use the Internet to communicate with parents, lost paperwork is never a problem. The newsletters, memos, classroom updates, menus and daily reports you put on your website stays there until you decide to take them down.

Parents who work crazy hours may rely on trusted relatives to drop their children off and pick them up every day. Since you rarely see these moms and dads, connecting with them is next to impossible. Even when you send notices home, the adults who are responsible for picking the kids up may lose the papers, toss them in the trash, or simply forget to hand them over to the parents.

Website communication allows parents the freedom to access important information 24/7. This lets mom and dad stay on top of what’s going on without interfering with their schedules. If the parents have questions or concerns, they can simply drop you an email and carry on with their day.

Exhausted parents don’t want to be bombarded with a stack of daily sheets and memos when they pick their kids up from childcare. For this reason, most of them will appreciate the convenience of online communication. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, parents can access your website and check their email messages after they have taken care of their families’ needs.

Staying connected with busy families can be tough for childcare professionals. But maintaining a line of communication is important to strengthen parent-teacher relationships, improve parental involvement, and increase the chances of children’s success. Using the Internet is an effective way to provide parents with reliable, convenient, and accessible communication.