Parents are a child’s first teacher as well as their most important and influential.
The lessons taught aren’t always reading, writing, or math but attitude, manners, life skills and more. From toddler messes to sharing toys.
These early lessons create a foundation for the type of learner your child becomes in the classroom.
Your involvement as a parent doesn’t end at the classroom door, it continues to be just as important as those early years. The type of support your child needs just changes.
When I worked in the schools, the students whose parents were involved were more likely to be confident and successful in academics. Even students in special education showed an improvement in behavior and progress goals when their parents were involved with them.
Being involved means talking with your child about school or their interests. Being an expert in math or reading is not required., And you don’t even need to understand the new curriculum (I’m looking at you Common Core). Connecting and learning together create a bonding experience.
Why is parental involvement important in education?
Parents influence students’ academic success, improved behavior in the classroom, lower dropout rates, increased participation in advanced courses.
These have all been researched over the decades.
As you can see, parents influence student success, not just their report cards but skills beyond the classroom and academics.
Hoover- Dempsey et al. also found that parent’s support of students’ emotional and social needs related to school improved those skills outside the home as well.
So even if parents aren’t able to help with calculus homework, they can still support their children learning the difficult material by working through it with them, listening to them talk about their struggles, or finding tutors to support them too.
A parent’s attitude or perspective on school is passed down to their children, and it shows in the classroom. Positive or negative, how a parent values school and academics, is often how a child will too.
Many organizations, including the National Parent Teacher Association, over the years have provided guidance for schools to help foster parental involvement.
These have included:
- Recognizing parents have a basic obligation to their child’s safety and health
- Recognizing schools have a basic obligation to communicate about school and the child with their parents
- Getting parents involved in non-academic activities at the school
- Getting parents involved in academic activities at home (helping with homework),
- Involving parents in decisions at the school
- Involving parents as part of the community around the school (family volunteer opportunities like Trunk or Treat).
What are the disadvantages of parental involvement in education?
In reality, there are no disadvantages to parents’ involvement in their child’s education, within reason.
The research showed only reasons why parents didn’t get involved or caution on too much involvement.
These included:
- It might embarrass your preteen or teenager to show up at their school (always make sure to communicate and plan with them so it’s not a surprise!).
- Parents become too involved to the point of limiting their child’s development of personal responsibility or limiting chances to learn skills on their own (aka helicopter or lawn mower parents).
- The false belief that their children are old enough to not need a parents’ involvement in their world.
- The harmful attitude that parent involvement in their child’s education takes time away from parents interests.
How can I be involved with my child’s education?
Involvement can look different for every family but the underlying basics are:
“Necessary part of or for a result”
“Engaged in an emotional or personal relationship.”
That’s part of the definition of involve from Merriam Webster’s dictionary. So with that definition in mind proceed with thinking about what’s involved in the value we can have for a child’s success.
Oftentimes, for students struggling in a subject, seeing their parents struggle with them is more valuable than parents telling them how to solve it.
Parents could model strategies when they’re frustrated and how to handle it or problem-solving strategies and work together with your child. For many students, that skill to handle difficult situations is more valuable than getting a math problem answer.
This can look like working through your child’s homework with them. No, you don’t have to be an expert in calculus to help them with this.
This could look like pursuing an activity they’re interested in together. Do they really like building Lego castles? Build a Lego castle with them and talk to them about it. This can open the door for talking about school and more.
This could even mean something more complicated like teaching them a skill, like how to fish or change the oil in the car.
How does this relate to learning a foreign language?
If your children are learning a foreign language in school but you don’t know it at home, have them show off to you.
It might hurt your ego a little bit, knowing that your children know something you don’t, but that look on their faces when they can do that awesome thing they’ve been working hard on is more valuable than your pride.
Another option – and I have a friend who’s doing this – is to learn the language with your child. This child’s parents are separated, dad speaks one language, mom doesn’t speak that language at all.
Whenever the daughter is at dad‘s house, they only speak that one language. Well, mom wanted to support her daughter in learning that language, and continue bonding with her daughter, so is learning some of that language, as well, which I think is fantastic.
Parents don’t always have to be separated for this to work.
It could be parents learning German together, because they all want to travel to Germany, but none of them know the language initially.
So they all want to learn together, and so they’re bonding as a family.
It could be parents who want their children to have all those benefits of learning a second language (hint: read this post for those benefits), so they’re learning the language so they can teach their children that language.
The potential scenarios of parents interacting with their children learning a second language are endless, but the result is going to be the same: You’re being involved in your child’s education and that leads to more success.
And every parent’s goal is for their children to succeed in life.
How can I be involved in my child learning a foreign language?
Practice.
Give them space to practice without negative comments or laughter from others (or you).
Help them with flashcards, homework.
Let the child talk about what was learned and let them show off.
Find shows to watch together (change the language and turn on captions).
Find books to read together (keep in mind the language age when choosing books like I talk about here).
I have more ideas for starting a second language at home in this post.
Taking an active role in their new language shows them you value the new knowledge and value them.
The more involved the parent is in their child’s education and their learning the more successful that child will be as Jeynes wrote about.
This has nothing to do with how smart the parents are or how many degrees they have.
The important factor to the child is the attention from you and the interest in their world.
Let’s think about you as an adult for a second, you like it when people are interested in the same things you are.
You like when people listen to you.
Why wouldn’t your child?
