A Design for a Family-Centered Nursery School Affiliated With a College Home Economics Program

Although today we are just as concerned as ever about what is happening to children in our society, we are also broadening the scope of our concern to include the parents. To put this philosophy into practice, it is obvious that all phases of family-life education, including the laboratory nursery schools which are associated with Divisions of Home Economics, ought to be “family-centered” rather than either “child-centered” or “adult-centered”. The problem, then, is to design a nursery school program that is family-centered; that is, one that not only meets the needs of the child, but also is cognizant of the needs of the other family members. The result of such a program should be an improvement in the quality of the family life of the families involved. The hypothesis that was tested in the study described here may be stated as follows: The nursery school program presented in this paper is an improvement over the traditional program in accomplishing the goal of better family living. In order to verify or negate the hypothesis, a program was put into operation at South Dakota State College under the auspices of the Department of Child Development and Family Relations in the Home Economics Division. At the end of two college quarters the parents of the twenty-four enrolled nursery school children were asked to evaluate the effect of the program on their family lives by filling out a questionnaire and returning it to the nursery school teachers anonymously