Reciprocal Relations between Parent Involvement and Socioemotional Development among Boys and Girls in the Early Grades

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Elementary Education

Abstract

Girls in the U.S. outperform boys in nearly every aspect of education, and gender differences in social and behavioral skills are often cited as a potential explanation of girls’ advantages. This study examines two aspects of socioemotional development in a predominantly Hispanic sample of children in grades 1 to 3. Specifically, we ask whether behavioral skills displayed by sons and daughters differentially affect subsequent parenting and whether the effects of parent involvement on children’s behavioral skills differ for boys and girls. We focus on four types of behavioral skills—prosocial behaviors, externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and attention skills—and three types of parent involvement—parent-parent, parent-child, and parent-school. We find that male students display fewer prosocial behaviors, more externalizing problems, and fewer attention skills than female students, but we do not observe significant gender differences in parent involvement. Very few parent involvement measures are significant predictors of children’s subsequent behavioral skills, and there is little evidence that the forms of involvement measured in this study have differential effects on boys and girls. However, some child behavioral skills do significantly predict subsequent parent-child relations, and we find more evidence that the effect of behavioral skills on parent-child involvement may differ by gender.

Authors

• Hannah K Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Jeremy Fiel, University of Wisconsin-Madison