Ahead of its time, the 1974 Minnesota Legislature funded the piloting of six Early Childhood Family Education programs.

Today, ECFE is available statewide and serves thousands of parents and their young children from birth to age 5 each year. This fall, ECFE celebrates 40 years of educating Minnesota’s families.

ECFE understands the importance of the early years as learning years. Right from birth, parents shape the child’s development, strengthen the parent-child relationship and set the stage for future learning and growth as a family. ECFE supports families by offering a variety of classes to provide education, encouragement and support for both parents and young children.

ECFE offers all parents and their infants, toddlers and preschoolers an opportunity to go to school to play and learn together. ECFE classes are taught by licensed teachers and have three components:

Parent-child activity time to enhance the child’s language, pre-reading and math skills.

Parent education time to share ideas and support and to discuss topics like babies and sleep, keeping up with a toddler, child development, temperament traits, discipline techniques, family fun ideas and more.

Child-only playtime when children continue to play and learn as their parents attend parent education time.

The original intent of creating ECFE was grounded in research that linked the quality of the child’s development from birth to kindergarten age with later school success. That research has been proven many times over. In the last four decades, ECFE has supported parents as their child’s first teachers by offering parent-child classes.

Local ECFE programming is available through District 241 Community Education. For more information and to register for ECFE classes, contact Megan Gooden at 507-379-4838.