When it comes to children’s development and education, parents matter.
Parents matter. Parents matter to me. When it comes to jobs the most important has to be parenting. Although without pay, it is arguably the most rewarding position you will ever have. Yet it comes with so many challenges and yes probably some heartbreak. I wish I could say being a good parent is innate, but even if you have a solid foundation in preparing you to be a parent you will, most likely, at some time be faced with situations that you do not know how best to handle.
With the growing international recognition of the importance of the parental role in their child’s education, the UK Government commissioned Charles Desforges and Alberto Abouchaar to examine research findings on the relationship between family education, parental support and parental engagement on the one hand and their child’s achievement and adjustment in schools on the other. Desforges and Abouchaar’s (2003) review suggested that to improve the educational achievement of children and young people parents need to support their children; this goes beyond providing the basic needs such as housing, love, safety and nutrition and extends to include parent–child interaction, helping with school work and educational choices and communication with their child’s educational setting.
The most important finding from Desforges and Abouchaar’s review was that parental engagement in their child’s learning and development could have a notable positive impact on their child’s attainment and achievement.
In the primary age range the impact caused by different levels of parental involvement is much bigger than differences associated with variations in the quality of schools. The scale of the impact is evident across all social classes and all ethnic groups.(Desforges and Abouchaar 2003, pp. 4–5)
This suggests that parental engagement can have a greater impact on the child’s achievement than the variations in teaching quality between schools. This is quite a remarkable finding.
I should highlight here that the terms “involvement ” and “engagement ” are frequently used interchangeably in the literature; I will clarify this distinction later in this chapter in the section Introduction to Key Terms.
Before I share the details of my study, first a little about myself and why I considered this to be an important area that required investigation.
My Ph.D. research interest came about through over 30 years of working with children, young people and parents. This has included being a parent programme designer and facilitator, Educational Psychologist Assistant, preschool leader and primary school teacher as well as the Parent Support, Extended Services and Children’s Centre Advisor for a local authority in the south-west of the UK. The differences in relationships between children and their parents, through observation in my professional experience, appeared to have a noticeable impact on children’s behaviour, development, attainment, school attendance, social interaction and ultimately on their future outcomes.
My interest in parenting and parental engagement has also been influenced by 31 years of being a mother. As a mother I have always treasured the time I have spent with my three children from reading stories and playing with them as they discovered the world through encouraging them to develop and explore their imaginations and creativity, to supporting their learning with field trips and helping with homework, to embracing their passions and helping them achieve their dreams. However the knowledge and skills necessary for positive parenting do not come with the arrival of a new baby; for many parents they have not had positive parenting experiences themselves or have lacked the opportunity to learn these skills. For parent and child, this can mean missing out on these formative shared experiences; for the child this can also mean not reaching their full academic potential without such valuable parental engagement.
In my role as a parent programme facilitator, parents frequently shared with me that attending the programme had improved their knowledge around child development and made a positive difference to their parenting skills. A common comment after completing the programme was that they wished they had attended a course earlier. As a preschool leader and primary school teacher parents have thanked me for the time I have given them to discuss their child and for my support. This relationship between myself, as an educational professional, and parents is I believe fundamental in promoting communication between home and the educational setting and in fostering partnership working. It can help parents feel less threatened about coming to talk to teachers around any concerns they may have or asking for assistance in explaining how they can best support their child with their education. This I believe helps promote parental engagement in their child’s education and subsequently improved achievement for their child.
Introduction to Key Terms
Throughout this book, a number of terms are introduced which might benefit from a clear definition of how I use them.
Parents
Although when using the term “parents” I am referring to both mothers and fathers, the parents involved in this study were predominantly mothers; in both my professional experience and the evidence from the literature it is still mainly mothers who are the primary caregivers (Shuffelton 2015) and it is the mother who usually attends a parenting programme. However there are fathers, albeit fewer, who are the primary caregiver and who attend the parenting programme so the use of parents rather than mothers is used to reflect this.
Parenting Styles
Parenting styles refers to the broader pattern of parenting practices relating to the behaviours and interactions between the parent and their child. For example Baumrind (1967) described four styles of parenting in her research: neglectful, permissive, authoritarian and authoritative. Gottman’s (1997) research also identifies four central parenting styles: the dismissing parent, the disapproving parent, the laissez-faire parent and the emotion-coaching parent.
Parenting Skills
Parenting skills are the techniques and tools that the parent can adopt in their interactions with their child including: using positive praise; establishing routines; setting clear consistent boundaries; engaging in parent–child activities to support and promote their child’s social, emotional, physical and cognitive development.
Parental Involvement and Parental Engagement
Specifically here I will be referring to parental involvement and engagement with their child’s education and development.
Parental involvement focuses primarily on the educational process and educational setting. This is largely concerned with information sharing between parents and school or school-related activities including: parents’ evenings; school assemblies; home/school agreement; supporting the Parent Teacher Association; helping out in the library. These activities are not directly associated with the child’s learning and may have little impact on the child’s attainment (Harris and Goodall 2007).
Parental engagement goes one step further with parents actively taking a role in supporting or creating activities to promote their child’s development and education. This could include: developing a stimulating and positive home learning environment; actively taking an interest and supporting their child’s schoolwork and homework; engaging in activities with their child that would promote their child’s social, emotional, physical and cognitive development. Parents are “doing with” rather than “being done to” or “doing to”.
I have defined above how I use and interpret these two terms, however in the literature these phrases are often used interchangeably; an example of this would be when Desforges and Abouchaar use the term “involvement” yet when Goodall and Vorhaus (2011) refer to this document they use the term “engagement”—both referring to the same paren...