Child and Parent Perspectives on the Quality of Parental Homework Involvement

• In Event: The Quality of Parental Involvement in Children’s Schooling: Considering Measures and Outcomes

Abstract

Helping with homework is one of the most typical ways in which parents become involved in their children’s schooling (Wingard & Forsberg, 2009). However, parental homework involvement is not always beneficial for the child. Although the quantity of parental homework involvement is important, what matters most is the quality (Moroni et al., 2015). Previous studies have found that when parental homework involvement is controlling or intrusive, students have lower academic achievement (Dumont et al., 2012; Silinskas & Kikas, 2019). When parental homework involvement is autonomy and emotionally supportive and parents provide structure in the homework context, students have higher academic achievement (Dumont et al., 2014; Grolnick & Ryan, 1989; Pomerantz et al., 2007). In most of these studies, children reported on the quality of their parents’ practices, given that information provided by children is considered a valid source for recording parental parenting behavior (Gonzales et al., 1996; Grolnick et al., 1989). However, when aiming to improve the quality of parental homework involvement through interventions, it is important to understand whether children’s perceptions of the quality of their parents’ help with homework differ from the parents’ perceptions. In fact, a recent meta-analysis found a small association of r = .28 between child and parent reports of general parenting behaviors (Hou et al., 2020).

Using a sample of 881 secondary school students (46.8% male, M = 14.11 years-old, 14.3% immigrants), recruited from the German speaking part of Belgium, and their parents, the present study aimed to analyze similarities and differences between child and parent reports of the quality of parental homework involvement. In doing so, we also differentiated between mothers’ and fathers’ homework involvement. The quality of parental homework involvement was measured via three dimensions – supportive involvement, intrusive involvement, and provision of structure – using the same items for children and parents (e.g., child: “My mother/father helps me with my homework if I ask her/him to;” parent: “I help my child with homework if he or she asks me”). Analyses were conducted in Mplus 8 while taking into account the nested data structure via the “type=complex” command and building on a full information maximum likelihood estimation.

As shown in Table 1, there were small to moderate associations between children’s and parents’ perceptions of the quality of parental homework involvement. The highest correlation was between children’s and mother’s perceptions of intrusive involvement. Further, analyses of mean differences between children’s and parents’ reports shown in Table 2 revealed that parents perceived their own involvement in a more positive manner than children did. Taken together, our study confirms differences in the perceptions of children and parents for parental homework involvement and highlights the importance of taking these differences into account in future research. Our results are also important for improving the quality of parental homework involvement. For instance, by raising awareness in parents that their child may perceive their involvement differently than intended and encouraging them to ask their child about his or her perceptions, it could significantly improve the homework situation at home.

Authors

• Sandra Moroni, University of Teacher Education Bern
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hanna Dumont, University of Potsdam
  Presenting Author