Parents’ involvement in their children’s education
DONNA BERTHELSEN and SUE WALKER n this paper, the nature of parental involvement in children’s education in the early years of school is investigated, as well as the relationship between parental involvement and children’s learning competence. The analyses use Wave 2 data from Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) for children in the kindergarten cohort, who were recruited at age 4 into the study. At the time of the Wave 2 data collection in 2006, these children were in Year 1 and 2 at school. Research findings on parental involvement are first briefly reviewed, and then the analyses using the LSAC data are discussed.
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Questions considered include: What expectations do parents have for their child’s education? How responsive do parents believe that schools and teachers are to their needs? What contact do parents have with their children’s school and teachers in the early years of school? Does parental involvement predict children’s learning competence? Engaging families in the education of their children at home and at school is increasingly viewed as an important means to support better learning outcomes for children. When schools and families work together, children have higher achievement in school and stay in school longer (Henderson &
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Family Matters 2008 No. 79
Australian Institute of Family Studies
Mapp, 2002; Jeynes, 2005; Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007; Reynolds & Clements, 2005). Although there has been considerable research on how parents influence children’s development, less is known about the specific ways in which parents socialise their children in terms of school-related behaviours. While extensive research indicates that there are important links between parenting and children’s academic and
