Family Factors and the Educational Success of Children

William Jeynes, William Jeynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317993650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Family Factors and the Educational Success of Children addresses a wide range of family variables and a diverse array of family situations in order to understand the dynamics of the multifaceted relationship between family realities and educational outcomes of children. It provides research on building effective partnerships between parents and teaches the importance of parental style, parental involvement as a means of improving family life, the influence of family factors on children of color, and the role of religion in influencing family and educational dynamics.

This bookis a valuable resource for academics, family scientists, social workers, psychologists, parents, and students. The book contains research on a full variety of issues, which will provide insight into a wide range of practical matters regarding the influence of the family. The research methodology included in this book includes examining large data sets, case studies, research syntheses and other student surveys. As a result of reading this book, individuals will have greater insight into how a multitudinous number of family factors ultimately influence the educational success of children, whether that is experienced directly or indirectly.

This book was published as a double special issue of Marriage and Family Review.

Introduction: The Salience of Family Factors in Children’s School Experiences

William H. Jeynes

This collection of articles will focus on the factors that influence the relationship between the family and education. Over the last 40 years, social scientists have become increasing concerned with the relationship between family factors and student academic outcomes (Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992). At first the concern with this association focused primarily on family structure (Hetherington, Stanley-Hagan, & Anderson, 1989). This initial orientation was understandable because during the 1963–1980 period the divorce rate surged for 17 consecutive years (Wirtz, 1977; Jeynes, 2007). During the mid-to late 1960s, other non-traditional family structures began to increase (Popenoe, 1994; Zill and Nord, 1994). Parental remarriage, never married single-parent families, cohabitation, and numerous other family structures rose during this period (Jeynes, 2000). The dramatic changes in family structure fostered a copious amount of new research on the influence of divorce, remarriage, and other family structure on the school outcomes of children (Jeynes, 2005).

The call for a huge increase in the amount of family research intensified with the release of the Coleman report in 1966. This report was quite sobering because it concluded that home factors, such as family structure, parental education level, and parent availability, exerted a greater impact on educational outcomes than did school factors. Suddenly, the academic community ostensibly comprehended a truth that the American public had recognized for centuries. That is, family factors exerted a puissant impact on educational outcomes that school variables could not rival (Chamberlin, 1961; Gangel & Benson, 1983).

A pervasive body of research resulted from these developments that gave theorists, leaders, teachers, and lay people a greater understanding of the reasons why family structure had the impact that it did on student academic achievement. Naturally, various social scientists gave a plethora of reasons why family structure had the effect that it did (Hetherington & Jodl, 1994). Certain factors, however, regularly rose to the top of the list of explanations (Hetherington, Stanley-Hagan, & Anderson, 1989; Zill, 1994). Researchers propounded explanations that included various manifestations of psychological stress, reduced levels of parental involvement and access, emotional turmoil, depression, and reduced educational and economic resources (Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992; Zill, 1994).

Because reduced parental involvement and access emerged as some of the most important reasons why family structure influenced achievement to the extent that it did helped initiate the discipline of parental involvement research (Jeynes, 2002; Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989). The fact that reduced parental engagement influenced achievement among children from single-parent and blended or reconstituted families made social scientists realize that insufficient parental involvement could also have a negative impact on achievement among children in intact families as well (Jeynes, 2007).

The study of parental involvement, as distinguished from the examination of family structure emerged during the 1980s. As interest in the study of parental involvement has grown, social scientists have especially displayed an interest in examining the effects of parental involvement on children of color (Epstein, 2001; Jeynes, 2003). This development emerged as a natural result of the nation’s concern with the achievement gap between African American and Hispanic students on the one hand and white students on the other (Green, 2001; Simpson, 1981). Beginning in the 1960s, the achievement gap became probably the most central debate in education (Green, Blasik, Hartshorn, & Shatten-Jones, 2000; Roach, 2001). Part of the reason for the national interest in the achievement gap is because the nature of the gap not only exists by race, but also by socioeconomic status (Slavin & Madden, 2001). In other words, there exists an equally wide achievement gap between those of high and low socioeconomic status (Slavin & Madden, 2001). The main component of SES that appears to explain this gap is the educational component (Mullen, Goyette, & Soares, 2003). That is, students with parents of high educational achievement have a considerable advantage in school grades than their counterparts whose parents who do not have a strong educational background (Wojtkiewicz & Donato, 1995).

The results of various studies examining the effects of parental involvement on the educational outcomes ofminority students indicate that the parental involvement is as strongly related with educational achievement for African American and Latino youth as it is for white youth (Georgiou, 1999; Hampton, Mumford, & Bond, 1998). Meta-analyses that were conducted over the last several years, in order to synthesize the existing research, that indicate that parental involvement and academic achievement among children of color are strongly related (Jeynes 2003, 2005, 2007). These results confirm the findings of other studies that have utilized a variety of analytical strategies that have included the use of nationwide data sets, programs a variety of school settings, and the examination of a full gamut of home environments (Georgiou, 1999; Hampton, Mumford, & Bond, 1998).

The findings that demonstrate a relationship between parental involvement and student outcomes for racial minority students have spurred a high level of research examining how to best utilize the use of parental engagement to maximize its educational advantage. Largely because of the salience of this issue, three of the studies included in this double issue are dedicated to examining parental minority students. These articles examine the relationship between family variables and educational outcomes, with a special emphasis of parental involvement in one form or another.

The collection opens with three review articles: one on parenting styles, another a historical review of children’s education and the public school, and a final article on the effect of fathers’ involvement on children’s early learning. These provide excellent reviews of the state of parental involvement research from different perspectives. Lola Brown and Shrinidhi Iyengar review the literature on the effects of parental style on academic outcomes in their article entitled, “Parenting Styles: The impact on student achievement.” Past studies of parental involvement (Jeynes, 2005, 2007) have cited parental style as one of the most salient elements of parental involvement. Brown and Iyengar examine parental style in five research domains that include parental control, gender and parenting style, parental education, perceptual differences, and ethnicity and diversity. The researchers found that parental style has an impact on educational outcomes in a number of ways.

The second review article is written by Diana Hiatt-Michael and is entitled, “Families, Their Children’s Education, and the Public School: An Historical Review.” In this article Dr. Hiatt-Michael examines the history of the practice of parental involvement from colonial times until the present era. She particularly focuses on the four forces she believes ultimately influence the kind and degree of parental involvement. They include the cultural beliefs of families, the social structure of the family, the state of the economy, and the political pressures in the country. In addition, Hiatt-Michael’s article is especially penetrating in its analysis of the growing tension between parents and teachers. She points out that this friction is a direct consequence of many teachers’ desire for parents to treat them as professionals, free from parental interference.

In the final article in this section, “Father Involvement and Children’s Early Learning: A Critical Review of Published Empirical Work from the Past 15 Years,” Downer, Campos, McWayne, and Gartner focus their attention on the importance of father involvement. They note that traditional social science research addresses parental involvement and mother involvement much more than the participation of fathers. The researchers not only point out this gap in the research, but also provide compelling evidence that father involvement plays a salient role in children’s lives. Their survey of the research indicates that fathers may play certain unique roles in the lives of children that are difficult to replicate by others.

The second set of articles examines family factors as they relate to the educational achievement of Hispanic students. Leslie Reese and Claude Goldenberg conduct an intriguing study entitled, “Community Literacy Resources and Home Literacy Practices Among Immigrant Latino Families.” Reese and Goldenberg address the importance of family and community involvement in maximizing literacy among Latino students. They examine 35 schools located in Texas and California in order to address the practices of family and community literacy. They also sample a wide range of language programs for English language learners to help ensure the generaliz-ability of their results.

Reese and Goldenberg’s study, “Community Literacy Resources and Home Literacy Practices Among Immigrant Latino Families,” produced two prominent findings. The first was that, as expected, variables such as education, income, and ethnicity are associated with literacy rates. The second finding, and certainly the most intriguing of the two, found that there was no relationship between literacy resources in the community and literacy practices in the family. Family literacy practices refer to the fact that families maintain certain disciplines that encourage or discourage literacy apart from the resources in the community. This result supports the notion that a parental involvement policy that aids and supports families will probably have more of an influence than one that is focused primarily on increased funding.

René Antrop-González, William Veléz, and Tomás Garrett’s qualitative study entitled, “Examining Famial-Based Academic Success Factors in Urban High School Students: The Case of Puerto Rican Female High Achievers,” dispelled the notion that Puerto Rican students living in poverty cannot achieve at high academic levels. They found that religiosity, in particular, as well as maternal factors and caring teachers all played a role in increasing the achievement of these female Puerto Rican youth. These in-depth interviews revealed that the subjects in the study specifically credited their religious family and their own personal religious commitment, maternal factors, and caring teachers as a source of personal strength and as contributing to their scholastic success.

“Expectations, Aspirations, and Achievement among Latino Students of Immigrant Families” by Dick Carpenter II, beautifully complements the two studies on Hispanic students. Carpenter uses the Educational Longitudinal Study (2002) database. Carpenter found the neither parental expectations nor socioeconomic status was a good predictor of academic outcomes, once he controlled for various covariates. However, probably the most interesting aspect of Carpenter’s study involves the covariates that he included and his conclusions regarding them. Two of these covariates are the number of parents in the home and parental attendance at educational events. Carpenter notes that his results therefore do not suggest that parental factors lack influence. Rather, he believes that it is likely “that parent expectations influence achievement indirectly” through other factors such as family structure and parental involvement.

Two articles examined the relationship between education and religion as a means for improving family lives and address that vital interrelationship of family, education, and religion. Leslie J. Francis is probably the most prolific academic writer in Europe on education and religion. Francis’ article entitled, “Family denomination, and the adolescent Worldview: An Empirical Enquiry Among 13- to 15-Year Old Females in England and Wales” gives insight into the inextricably connected roles that family and denominational affiliation play in helping to shape the way that adolescent student view the world around them. Francis’ study alerts the reader to the understanding that education is a multidimensional process that involves schools, the family, and religion. In addition, his article suggests that understanding the breadth of the educational process will help social scientists, parents, and others better understand the developmental process.

In Gastòn Espinosa’s article entitled, “Latino Religion, Education, and Marriage in the United States,” he examines a national data set to assess trends among the Latino population in the United States. What he finds is that the religious beliefs and educational experiences of Latinos are far more diverse than most Americans perceive and that this diversity clearly does not match the misconceptions that many people have of the Latino population. Moreover, Espinosa asserts that religion likely plays a considerably larger role in understanding marital and education patterns among Latinos than many social scientists currently assume.

Two papers examine how parental involvement can have ameliorative effects on the experiences of children that go well beyond the bounds of school outcomes. Eric Dearing, Holly Kreider and Heather B. Weiss in their article, “Increased Family Involvement in School Predicts Improved Child-Teacher Relationships and Feelings About School for Low-income Children,” focus on the effects of family involvement in school on children’s relationships with their teachers and children’s feelings about school. Their study focuses on low-income students from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The findings of the study indicate that increases in family involvement are associated with improvements in students’ relationship with teachers and improved attitudes towards school.

“Effects of Parental Involvement on Experiences of Discrimination and Bullying,” by William H. Jeynes examined the effects of parental involvement in a unique study examining its effect on bullying and discrimination experienced by students. Jeynes found that those students who had parents who were highly involved in their education and possessed high expectations of them were less likely to be bullied and were somewhat less likely to be discriminated against. These results suggest that the impact of parental involvement may be much broader th...