The Salience of the Subtle Aspects of Parental Involvement and Encouraging that Involvement: implications for school-based programs

First, educate parents to comprehend, and then act on, the fact that it is probably some of the more subtle aspects of parental involvement, such as high expectations and communication, that are among the most important. Second, educate school leaders, teachers, and staff to understand that raising parental participation may be more a function of subtle but important demonstrations of love and respect than a matter of instructing parents to apply particular methods of helping children. Naturally, all these factors are important, but the spirit and the attitude of parental involvement may actually be more important than the pedagogy applied at home.

The types of expectations that have the greatest impact are those that are subtle but understood by the child, such as parental sacrifice to save for the child's college, low-stress communication, and a general agreement between the child and the parents on the value of a college education

Therefore it is essential that educators redefine what they mean by parental involvement.  Myriad teachers and caregivers conceptualize parental involvement as specific overt actions that act as catalysts for improved school performance in children. These actions, such as helping with a child's homework and establishing household rules for a child's leisure and class activities, may yield certain desirable results and are reasonably easy for social scientists to code, quantify, and analyze. Nevertheless, viewing parental involvement as specific actions, as just described, tends to mechanize parental involvement into a series of regiments that, if followed, will yield positive school outcomes

The study concluded that "educators, parents, and other social scientists need to broaden and add more sophistication to their concept of parental involvement. As increasing waves of parental involvement research become available, educators are now realizing that a considerable portion of parental involvement is subtle.... Moreover, recent research also indicates that some of the primary ways that school employees can foster parental involvement are also subtle. Although particular practices of parents and schools contribute to school outcomes, the love and caring attitudes that parents and teachers possess and that spawn and undergird many of these practices appear more important than certain specific practices. When one combines the results of meta-analyses on parental involvement and reviews of a variety of programs that exist, the prominent role of qualities such as love, respect, and sensitivity becomes evident....

 The results of this overview of the parental involvement research suggest that one plausible way of increasing the effectiveness of parental involvement programs, and thereby reducing the gap previously mentioned, is to focus on the following. First, educate parents to comprehend, and then act on, the fact that it is probably some of the more subtle aspects of parental involvement, such as high expectations and communication, that are among the most important. Second, educate school leaders, teachers, and staff to understand that raising parental participation may be more a function of subtle but important demonstrations of love and respect than a matter of instructing parents to apply particular methods of helping children.

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