Poster #31 - “Whose needs get priority?” Mothers’ goals during parent-child homework interactions predict quality of homework involvement

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

It is well documented in the literature that the quality of parents’ involvement in children’s homework, rather than the quantity (e.g., amounts of time spent), is key for parental homework involvement to benefit child development. Specifically, constructive involvement featuring positive emotions, autonomy support, and mastery-oriented teaching (vs. unconstructive involvement featuring negative emotions, control, and performance-oriented teaching) facilitates children’s academic and nonacademic functioning (Pomerantz et al., 2007). Understanding predictors of parents’ constructive (vs. unconstructive) homework involvement has thus become a major endeavor among researchers. Yet, prior work focuses mainly on relatively general and static parental characteristics (e.g., socialization goals for children and parenting efficacy), which may not map onto daily parenting practices such as homework involvement (Bornstein et al., 2018).
Inspired by the Goal-Regulation Model of Parenting (Dix & Branca, 2003), this research investigated how relatively situational, proximal, and reactive parenting goals particularly during parent-child homework interactions – termed “homework interaction goals”– may predict the quality of parental homework involvement. Defined as the immediate outcomes that parents prioritize to promote during parent-child homework interactions, two types of goals were examined, namely, parent-oriented goals (e.g., wanting the child’s compliance) that prioritize parents’ own needs over children’s needs “at the moment” versus child-oriented goals (e.g., wanting to comfort the child) that prioritize children’s needs.
Mothers (N=389, mean age=40.5 years) of fourth graders in a megacity in China completed a survey; 261 of them also completed daily diaries for 14 consecutive days approximately one week later. In the survey, regarding their participating child, mothers reported their parent- versus child-oriented homework interaction goals and their constructive versus unconstructive homework involvement in response to a hypothetic scenario of the child approaching homework in a helpless manner (e.g., showing frustration, giving up); they also indicated the typical amount of time they spent on homework involvement, their general self-efficacy of homework involvement and filial piety and self-development socialization goals for the child, and their perceptions of the child’s general helplessness toward homework. In the diaries, mothers indicated their homework interaction goals, quality of homework involvement, and the amount of time spent on homework involvement on a daily basis when their participating child demonstrated helplessness toward homework.
Both person-level analyses on the survey data (see Table 1) and daily-level analyses on the diary data (see Table 2) revealed that the greater mothers’ endorsement of parent-oriented goals during homework interactions, the more unconstructive their homework involvement, whereas the greater mothers’ endorsement of child-oriented goals, the more constructive their homework involvement, beyond the roles of a set of child characteristics and relatively general and static aspects of parenting under examination. These robust findings prove the importance of parents’ situational, proximal, and reactive goals during particular interactions with children in predicting qualitatively different parenting practices in daily life, highlighting the heuristic significance of the Goal-Regulation Model of Parenting, and also pointing to practical directions for parenting education and intervention programs (e.g., raising parents’ awareness of and competence at prioritizing children’s needs over their own needs “at the moment” during daily interactions with children).

Authors

• Zeyi Shi, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Qian Wang, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Yang Qu, Northwestern University