Parental involvement

Parental involvement

Introduction

Parental involvement describes a parent’s level of participation in his or her child’s schooling and life. It has a significant impact on children’s learning, education, and achievement. When learners know that they are receiving support from outside and inside the school environment, they improve their chances of becoming active and responsible in life. Parents are their children’s first teachers. The current concept of learning is focused on enhancing the child, both academically, socially, and emotionally. Schools and parents have partnered to help children acquire the appropriate knowledge to better their lives in the future. Programs have been implemented across various learning institutions to enable parents to become actively involved in the education of their children.

Children should be taught what they require to achieve success in their lives. Therefore, parents should learn how to manage their children at home to enhance their academic achievements. In the past two decades, active parental involvement has demonstrated significant progress in terms of improving learners’ accomplishments. However, apart from parental involvement, other factors influence learning achievement. These include social, economic status, age, student gender, teacher characteristics, and other school-related factors. This essay discusses different ways in which parents influence their children’s school experience, learning, and achievement using various theories and research evidence.

One major significant way through which parents influence the learning, achievement, and education of their children is through attachment.  Attachment describes the relationship between a parent and a child, with its main aim being making a child secure, safe, and protected. Most learning institutions nurture healthy and positive parental attachment and involvement through various volunteer opportunities, programs, and events. This is because parents are the most important individuals in the lives and education of children. From birth, young children are relying on and learning from their parents, together with other caregivers who act as parents by providing them with care and protection. These individuals influence a child’s knowledge, personalities, as well as their overall well-being.

Attachment is differentiated from other parenting aspects like disciplining, teaching, and entertainment. This is because it seems to be more important than other parenting elements towards enhancing the child’s development and survival. Positive parental attachment enables children to control undesirable emotions during stressful situations. It also helps children to handle everyday challenges that they might experience appropriately. This implies that positive parental attachment enables children to become more confident about learning and exploring their environment and the world.

The attachment theory provides that a child should establish strong physical and emotional associations with at least one of his or her primary caregivers. This theory proves that positive attachment is significant in ensuring children’s successful emotional and social development. This needs to take place during the child’s early infancy years. This is because attachment assists in enhancing a child’s proper growth and brain development. When a child receives proper parental attachment, he or she can become a compassionate and independent adult in the future. Therefore, the quality of parental attachment influences a child’s schooling and achievements.

There are five basic aspects of attachment that provide a clear understanding of the influence of parental attachment to children’s education, learning, and achievement.  They include proximity maintenance, secure base, safe haven, as well as separation distress. Safe haven implies that children can depend on their care providers for comfort when they feel frightened, threatened, or when experiencing any danger. Parents should, therefore, create a safe haven for their children to enhance their learning. This is because it enables children to establish genuine friendships, grow independent and responsible as well as improve their academic achievement.

A secure base entails care providers providing children with a reliable and proper foundation of learning and sorting things independently. The concept of providing a secure base is significant since it links attachment, knowledge, and exploration and provides a basis for high quality and secure attachment. Besides, securely attached children feel safe to learn, explore, and develop confidence, resilience, and competence. The concept of proximity maintenance implies that children aim at exploring the world while still try close to his or her care providers. On the other hand, separation distress involves children becoming sorrowful and unhappy when they are separated from their caregivers. All the attachment aspects discussed above to assist in maintaining a serene learning environment for the children.

According to it is evident that high quality and secure attachment provides the best foundation for healthy and positive emotional, physical, social, and intellectual development. Securely attached children are outgoing, curious, and freely able to explore their environment. Besides, such children are socially constructive, more empathetic, and less aggressive, as well as show greater persistence and creativity in dealing with life’s challenges. Therefore these learners can learn more efficiently and can cope with problems more easily than the insecurely attached children.

The attachment theory has various criticism and views. A well-recognized view of the theory is that of J. Bowlby, the father of the theory of attachment. He provides and believes that attachment begins at infancy and continues throughout the child’s life. Further, J. Bowlby suggests that several other inherent behavioral factors are essential for enhancing a child’s learning, protection, and survival. However, Harris 1998 criticizes the attachment theory by providing that parents do not influence and shape their children’s personality and character. He suggests that a child’s peers significantly affect his or her character and personality.

Parental involvement is another way through which parents influence their learners’ developments and achievements. Since today’s children represent the society’s future, parents should strive to ensure their children receive the best education. Arguably children with responsible and involved parents are considered more likely to achieve higher test scores and grades, enroll in high-level learning programs, earn credits, regularly attend school, and demonstrate improved social skills and learning in all dimensions. There are various factors impacting parental involvement, such as educational level, family composition, language barrier, ethnicity, and social, economic status. When there is an inadequacy in any of these factors, parental involvement is at a high risk since parents might miss out on essential information concerning the education of their children.

Evidence shows that parental involvement has a significant impact on children’s achievements. Fathers, for example, play an essential role in ensuring that their children achieve positive outcomes. A study by indicates that a father’s interest and involvement in the learning of their children is statistically linked to improved education outcomes. These outcomes include improved educational qualifications, better progress in life, higher educational achievements and expectations, as well as a better behavior and a more positive attitude. Overall, the study provides that consistent parental involvement positively influences a child’s achievements.

Parental involvement is vital in enhancing a child’s cognitive and social development. From early years parental involvement has been associated with improved outcomes, particularly in terms of a child’s cognitive development. This is because home educational activities carried out by parents are essential in ensuring children’s social and intellectual development. This implies that parental involvement is more significant in influencing a child’s education, learning, and achievement than parental income, education, and occupation. As a result, active Parental interest and involvement are highly associated with improved educational achievements than parents that demonstrate lower interest and involvement.

Apart from parental involvement and attachment, other alternative factors might influence a child’s education like disability, poverty, motivations, cognitive styles, culture, gender, subject content, teaching styles, learning skills, learning barriers, and peer group influence. These factors affect student learning and response to a teacher’s instructions. As a result, teachers are required to modify their curriculum programs to respond to the diverse needs of all learners appropriately. This will enable children to have an equal opportunity for obtaining the least fundamental competency skills in computation, writing, as well as reading.

Poverty-related factors influence children’s education, learning, and achievements. It affects the child’s well-being, health, learning ability, mobility level, and access to essential learning materials. This leads to poor learning outcomes due to limited language and literacy development in children. Therefore, educators should strive to be responsive and considerate of the needs of all learners. Particularly they should consider all the poverty constraints that influence a learner’s education as well as academic achievements. Understanding all the factors discussed above gives educators invaluable knowledge of teaching and supporting students from diverse social and economic backgrounds. It also leads to empathy and scaffolding as well as supporting learners to achieve their highest academic expectations.

Conclusion

There are different factors that affect children’s learning, education, and achievement. These factors include parenting aspects like parental involvement and attachment. Apart from the familial elements, many other factors influence a child’s educational outcomes. They include disability, poverty, motivations, cognitive styles, culture, gender, subject content, teaching styles, learning skills, learning barriers, and peer group influence.

Parental involvement and attachment significantly influence children’s academic achievements. This is because actively involved parents support their children in learning, which contributes to their positive academic achievements. As a result, children of highly involved parents tend to be more successful academically than children of less involved parents. Also, securely attached children demonstrated excellent learning progress and academic achievements.

Therefore, parents should be involved in their children’s school matters and learning activities to enable them to improve their academic performance. Parental involvement entails attending school meetings, providing children with a peaceful and conducive learning environment, regularly communicating and discussing a learner’s academic progress with teachers, and providing children with financial and emotional support to enable them to excel academically. Since parental involvement and attachment significantly influence a child’s learning outcomes, parents’ literacy on these factors should be improved. This can be achieved through seminars, training, adult education, as well as encouraging parents to start and finish formal education. Also, regular communication between teachers and parents should be strengthened to improve their relationships. This will enable children, teachers, and parents to appreciate the education’s significance.