Parental Involvement in Education

Lumas J. Helaire & Pamela Trotman Reid

Parental involvement in education can be understood as the action taken or activities engaged in by parents to affect the education or learning experience of their children. This may include parents' action or activities at home, in the school, and between home and school. Researchers generally assume that the level and quality of parental involvement results from beliefs about how children learn and what activities are important. The nature of parental involvement is believed to convey messages about these expectations and attitudes. Such expectations appear to influence students' self-concepts, which, in turn, predict achievement levels (Eccles, 1983; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2001). Although the family and the school are institutions jointly responsible for educating children and modeling socializing behavior that facilitates educational achievement, parents are typically the first agents of socialization for children. Thus, it is important for educational researchers and practitioners to understand how parents prepare and assist their children ...

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