As a parent, how much should I be involved in my child's studies?
As a parent, how much should I be involved in my child's studies?
While new studies have shown that parental involvement has a positive impact on a child’s academic success, many American parents are still struggling to determine how much they should be involved in their child’s studies. Considering the significance of parent’s engagement in their children’s educational activities, this article will help you understand the degree of parental involvement you should attain to bring about ideal results.
What does it mean to be involved in your child’s studies?
“Parental involvement” is a broad term that refers to several different forms of parental engagement a parent has when it comes to their child’s schooling. As a parent, you can be involved in your child’s education by attending parent-teacher meetings, creating a learning-friendly environment at home, monitoring homework, providing encouragement, and actively tutoring your children at home. Playing an active role in decision making and governance necessary for providing quality education for your community’s children is also a form of parental involvement.
Your involvement in the studies of your child starts at home when you provide a healthy and safe environment, support, and positive learning experiences. Studies reveal that students experience increased academic achievement when their parents are actively involved in their studies.
How much should you be involved in your child’s studies?
It might be difficult to define exactly how much you should be involved in your child’s education. When we look more closely at some of the prominent studies, there are clear indications that parental involvement is most effective when parents are actively engaged and work directly with their children on school-related activities at home.
Activities that involve you in tutoring your children using materials provided by educators, reading with them, and supporting their work on homework produce remarkable results. Simply put, the most positive and active forms of parental involvement produce impressive results in terms of academic achievements of your child.
Educationists often identify the impact of family and home environment in determining children’s academic success. While attending parent-teacher conferences or reading written communications from your child’s school is a beneficial activity, greater achievement benefits are witnessed when you consistently work with your child at home. The earlier you start to involve in your child’s study, the more beneficial it would be.
Encouraging parental involvement in children’s education, therefore, has become a major objective for both educators and policymakers in the United States. Increased parental involvement has been one of the key points of President Obama’s Race to the Top and President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. These programs are considered as the remedy for racial achievement and persistent socioeconomic gaps.
Let’s explore the important parental involvement components to further help you know to what extent you should be involved in your child’s schooling.
Six important components of parental involvement
Joyce Epstein, the director of the National Network of Partnership Schools at John Hopkin University, is a leading researcher who published over 100 studies focusing on family, school, and community programs. The prime focus of her research is to improve efforts to increase student success through an enhanced partnership between families, students, teachers, and the community. Epstein highlights six important factors to explain the subject: parental involvement.
1. Parenting
Parenting is the sum of all the activities you engage in to raise your children. The influence of teachers on your child’s success is relatively limited. As a parent, you have to maintain a life-long relationship with your children whose personality and achievements are likely to be the by-product of your parenting style. For example, uninvolved parenting styles generally lead to children who tend to have low self-esteem, lack of self-control, and are less competent. On the other hand, authoritative parenting styles help parents raise more happy, successful, and capable children.
2. Communicating
Teachers and parents can communicate with each other in many ways. Effective communication helps teachers understand their students, and parents understand their children’s educational history and health. To determine the ideal level of parent involvement in your case, you should take advantage of every mode of communication with the school.
3. Learning at home
Learning at home involves obtaining information about how you can best help your child with studies and curricular-related activities. Taking your children to a museum or helping your child with homework is a couple of examples of learning at home which encourages you to learn what your child is doing in the classroom or how you can help them with studies and setting academic goals each year.
4. Decision making
Parents should be a part of school decisions. You might consider becoming an active member of parent-teacher associations or join governance committees to influence the overall decision-making process. Parental involvement also plays a key role in developing successful education organizations and parent leadership.
5. Volunteering
You can volunteer to provide support for different activities and school programs. To be more precise, you can volunteer in three ways: help administrators, teachers or other parents as assistants; promote or fundraise for an event at school; be a part of an audience attending school programs. Parents can also volunteer their services to help the school maintain a safe environment for everyone involved.
6. Collaborate with the community
One of the indirect ways to contribute to your child’s success is to be a productive part of communities. Parents, schools and the community should work together to bring about a healthy and learning-oriented environment for all students. These partnerships lead to maximizing and sharing valuable resources.
Importance of parental involvement in a child’s education
The evidence that parental involvement produces positive results is now beyond dispute. When teachers collaborate with parents to support learning, children tend to perform better not just in school, but throughout life. Your social status or income might influence your child’s schooling, but the decisive factor will be your ability to:
- Develop a home environment that promotes learning
- Express realistic expectations for your child’s achievement
- Become involved in your child’s studies
Your involvement in your child’s studies matters now more than ever due to the growing distance between families and schools. The last few years have experienced a drop-in parents who believe being involved in their children’s academic pursuits is beneficial.
Remote methods of communications such as online student portals discourage parents from attending parent-teacher meetings and other activities in school. While technology and tools are helping parents stay informed, an increasing number of students in the United States are missing parents’ support and time.
Why get involved?
Parental involvement is directly linked to a child’s behavior and attitude. When you fully understand and implement the concept of parental engagement, it shows your child that you care about their education. Here are some of the benefits of being involved in your child’s studies:
- Higher test scores and grades
- Low dropout rate
- Better attendance
- Higher graduation rates
- Fewer placements in special education
- More positive behavior and attitude
Regardless of your income or background, if you’re adequately involved in your child’s studies, your child is more likely to secure higher grades, have better social skills, attend school regularly, and demonstrate healthy behavior.
Important considerations
Your involvement in your child’s studies must be a continuous process governed by a well-thought-out strategy. It’s a process that has its evolutionary phases. You need to understand that requirements for parent involvement keep changing as children go through from one level of schooling to another. It is also important to consider that not all parents have equal capacities and strengths for optimum participation in their children’s studies. Also, not all school systems provide objective guidelines for adequate parental involvement.
Researchers identify the types of parent involvement as students move through grades from elementary to secondary and so on. Parents become less involved as their children grow for several reasons: the curriculum is more advanced, schools are farther from home, a child has several teachers, children have developed a sense of independence, etc.
What hinders successful parent involvement
Educational institutes in the US often don’t provide guidelines on parental engagement. Educators perceive that parents or guardians don’t have time or tendencies to involve in their children’s schooling. If we look at the findings of leading studies, we come to know that parents don’t know how to be involved or how much they should be involved.
Most parents are often reluctant to become involved in school because they have a weak education history or don’t have extra time. They didn’t have a satisfactory experience with their own schooling, so they don’t feel like being involved in their children’s studies is going to be a good experience. The biggest obstacle in this regard is the lack of a reliable system that can connect parents with the school in a meaningful way.
Conclusion
Despite the communication barriers, parents and schools should try to foster healthy relationships to make things easier for everyone involved. If you’re determined to make a sound impact on your child’s academic achievements, take parental involvement as an opportunity to enrich your child’s schooling experience.
Increased parental involvement will lead to improved school climate, increased student success and parent satisfaction. However, don’t let your involvement make things difficult for your child. Develop a healthy relationship with your children so that you better understand them and their needs. Don’t let your child fall through the cracks; make sure to provide the necessary support.
