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Parent club/group ?
I'm considering starting a parent group. I was involved w/ one recently and it
just wasn't my cup of tea ... there were more 'politics' there than any place that I have worked. It was a very negative place to be. Anyway ... a friend from the group and I are considering starting our own parent group. The things we would like to do are local events and play dates (in home or in parks) and maybe a parent's night out now and then. I'm wondering what other parents would be interested in w/ a parent's group. What do you think the best and worst aspects of a parent's group? I want to make this open to SAHP and to working parents. Thanks for any ideas you can help me with. ~Kat "The early bird gets the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese." |
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Parent club/group ?
Jarkat2002 wrote:
I'm considering starting a parent group. I was involved w/ one recently and it just wasn't my cup of tea ... there were more 'politics' there than any place that I have worked. It was a very negative place to be. Anyway ... a friend from the group and I are considering starting our own parent group. The things we would like to do are local events and play dates (in home or in parks) and maybe a parent's night out now and then. I'm wondering what other parents would be interested in w/ a parent's group. What do you think the best and worst aspects of a parent's group? I want to make this open to SAHP and to working parents. Thanks for any ideas you can help me with. We did something similar. We worked things very informally. We didn't have a rule about it, but ours was largely geographically based. We started with a few of us in the neighborhood, then added people as we ran into interested folks. We did start meeting in people's homes, which I think was most successful, but that only worked well when we had ten families or less and the kids were preschool aged. As the playgroup got bigger and the kids got bigger, it became tough to have it in people's homes because it just got to be too much. Then we went to meeting outside, but weather makes that problematic on occasion. I think meeting in people's homes tends to bond the group together better, but it isn't always practical and not everyone is willing to do that. Incorporating WOHPs who are doing the usual 9-5 kind of thing is tough, because people are often loathe to give up their weekends and evenings often don't work well for meeting times. We have several parents who work, but all of ours work either part time or telecommute or both, so that we've always had meetings during the day. I don't know how we'd swing evening or weekend meetings. We try to do something in the evening or weekend occasionally to bring in the entire family (older school-aged kids, both parents, etc.), but people tend not to be willing to do that regularly. We also have a monthly mom's night out, which works very well. Even when weather and schedules interferes with the playgroup, the moms still get out ;-) We've tried a dad's night out, and they always seem to have fun when they do it, but they've never been able to get it off the ground and keep it going (they seem logistically challenged ;-) After we'd had the playgroup going for a year or so, we also spun off a babysitting co-op. That's also been very helpful. I do notice an ebb and flow with the playgroup. It seems to work best when kids are preschool aged. People who really enjoy the other members will keep going even as their kids get older, but it seems to be when the kids are preschool aged that the families are most interested and most committed to a playgroup, so I'd focus recruiting efforts there. It helps to have some of those really gregarious people who go everywhere, meet everyone, know everything. They're great recruiters. It also helps to have someone who's organizationally inclined to keep up a list or put out a little newsletter or whatever. We found that having it be a neighborhood playgroup *really* helped because we were running into each other all the time and had a lot to tie us together. It also made it easy on everyone, because we could usually walk to playgroup events. That might not always be practical, though. It made the playgroup a *great* source of information about local school issues, preschools, activities, etc., though. One thing that really helped with our playgroup was that people in it were genuinely friends, or at least everyone in it was genuinely friends with someone else. We had little politicking or infighting going on. There were occasional squabbles (e.g., someone getting upset at how a parent handled an issue between kids or some such thing), but in general everyone really liked each other. Our playgroup has been a very positive experience for us, and I think for most of the members. I think we've got a bit of a challenge now, though. Some people have moved away and the original members' kids have gotten much older. We need some parents of younger kids who are intereested in sort of taking the reins and keeping things more active. I think there are some likely candidates, but we'll see how it goes. Best wishes, Ericka |
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