We have found that young children respond positively to their parents' active involvement in school affairs—in giving of their time, energy and interest. When parents are directly involved in the classroom, the child becomes aware of many warm and caring adults outside his or her immediate family, and so at an early age begins to build a picture of the outer world as a safe and friendly place in which to live. For parents as well as children, our kind of school has special meaning. Parents, working as they do with many children alongside teachers, learn to see their own child in a truer perspective. Anxiety may diminish as they become aware of other children experiencing the common problems of growth. Or conversely, parents may develop new insights into those aspects of growth still awaiting their child, i.e., opportunities for developing autonomy, self-expression, self-assertion or self-control. Thus enlightened through their participation in the life of the school, parents may develop new understandings of how the child thinks, perceives and reacts. In sum, our school seeks to affect not only the children's attitudes toward the adult world, but the adults' feeling toward the children's world as well.