Designed for administrators, educators, and people interested in children's learning, this book explores ways to reawaken parents' understanding of their role as their children's first teachers. The volume is divided into four major sections. Part 1, which provides a background and rationale for developing intergenerational programming in support of family literacy, strongly supports a new focus on educating families rather than children or adults alone, provides background information about family programming, and introduces a family literacy statute. Part 2 describes three family literacy programs that focus on adults and children reading storybooks together, emphasizing give-and-take as the basis for intergenerational communication. Part 3 examines family literacy in multicultural settings, describing multilingual communities as treasure chests of linguistic and cultural riches and warns that educators can either tap and nurture these riches, or preside over their rapid demise. Part 4 addresses the practitioner who may be working alone or with a team to generate increased parent participation in children's learning, and suggests methods to encourage parent-child interaction in a literacy context. The epilogue is a reaffirmation of parenting, pointing out that the growing awareness of the family's critical contribution to children's learning underscores the need to create educational programs that are more comprehensive and holistic. Most of the chapters contain references. (AA)