Parental involvement during the transition to primary school: Examining bidirectional relations with school adjustment

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.03.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Language/cognitive activities at T1 predicted better school adjustment at T2.

  • Low cognitive skills at T1 predicted home-school conferencing at T2.

  • More opportunities should be provided for parents to involve in children's learning.

Abstract

The changes in maternal involvement during the transition to primary school and the bidirectional relations between maternal involvement and school adjustment were explored in this study using a two-wave longitudinal design with a 8-month interval. The participants were children (mean age: 5 years 10.39 months at Time 1 and 6 years 4.98 months at Time 2), mothers, and kindergarten and primary school teachers from 324 and 247 Hong Kong middle- and upper-middle-class families at Time 1 and Time 2, respectively. Approximately three months before the children finished kindergarten (Time 1), and 3 months after they entered primary school (Time 2), mothers and teachers reported on the mothers' involvement and teachers rated the children's school adjustment. Data related to children's school adjustment were also collected in a child assessment session. Results revealed that mothers' involvement in language and cognitive activities during kindergarten predicted better school adjustment after the school transition. Mothers were also more involved at their children's primary schools when their children demonstrated lower cognitive skills in kindergarten. The findings highlight the importance of examining both home-based and school-based involvement over time during the transition to primary school and the bidirectional relations between maternal involvement and children's school adjustment.

Introduction

Parental involvement is a multifaceted concept that encompasses a broad range of parenting practices, such as shared-book reading and communicating with teachers, that mobilize the resources of parents both at home and in school to maximize the benefits for their children (Fan & Chen, 2001). The typology of parental involvement developed by Epstein, 2001, Epstein, 2010 is widely recognized in the field. It focuses on the role of the school in facilitating different dimensions of the home-school partnership at home (e.g., learning at home, which involves families in learning activities at home), at school (e.g., volunteering at school, which involves families as volunteers to support school programs), and in the community (e.g., collaborating with the community, which involves coordinating community resources to strengthen school programs and family practices). Pomerantz, Moorman, and Litwack (2007) proposed that the broad distinction between parental involvement in different contexts could offer a useful way to investigate the processes and outcomes of parental involvement. In this study, we focus on both home- and school-based involvement and their bidirectional relations with children's school adjustment.

During the first year of primary school, children are presented with new academic challenges while adjusting to a new school environment and experiencing a major transition with new and diverse developmental challenges that require emotional, social, and cognitive competence at home and in school (Cabrera, 2010; Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 1999). Children who enter school with more advanced cognitive abilities are more likely to benefit from classroom instruction and demonstrate more advanced skills in school (Duncan et al., 2007). However, the developmental trajectory of children who adjust poorly during school transition is discouraging, resulting in academic difficulties and antisocial behavior, which may further increase their likelihood of disliking school and eventually dropping out (Gutman, Sameroff, & Cole, 2003).

Although high-quality preschool programs and school transition practices have been found to enhance children's school readiness skills (Schulting, Malone, & Dodge, 2005), other researchers have found parental involvement to be crucial during the early school transition (Fantuzzo, McWayne, & Perry, 2004). According to social support theory (Cohen & Wills, 1985), parental involvement is an important social resource that helps children cope with different challenges in their learning and development and may be a strong and reliable determinant of children's outcomes. Consistent with this view, findings from cross-sectional studies have suggested that parental involvement is associated with positive child outcomes, such as academic achievement and social-emotional development (Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011; El Nokali, Bachman, & Votruba-Drzal, 2010; Lau, Li, & Rao, 2011; Phillipson & Phillipson, 2007). It has been suggested that when parents and teachers work collaboratively to support children, children are more likely to experience a successful school transition and show enhanced school adjustment, which is generally defined in terms of academic performance (i.e., language and cognitive skills) and school engagement (Birch & Ladd, 1997). Within the family context, processes related to home learning stimulation have also been found to enhance opportunities for optimal academic achievement for children from diverse cultural backgrounds (Fantuzzo et al., 2004; Li & Rao, 2000).

In fact, the view of parental involvement as a dynamic versus static variable represents a major conceptual shift in the literature that acknowledges parents' accommodation of changes in children's development and age-graded expectations (Hill & Taylor, 2004), as child development is viewed as a product of the continuous dynamic interactions of a child and the experiences provided by his or her family and social context (Bell, 1968; Sameroff, 2009; Sameroff & Mackenzie, 2003). Although an increasing number of studies have explored parental involvement at the time of school entry, they have been limited in their cross-sectional designs (e.g., Graves & Brown Wright, 2011; Nelson, 2005) and the relations between children's outcomes and their parents' involvement are far more sparse than the reverse (Ansari & Crosnoe, 2015; Barbot, Crossman, Hunter, Grigorenko, & Luthar, 2014; Crosnoe, Augustine, & Huston, 2012; Lugo-Gil & Tamis-LeMonda, 2008).

While parental involvement has generally been linked to positive child outcomes, there remain many conflicting findings about the relation between parental involvement and children's outcomes (for a review, see Fan & Chen, 2001). When findings are inconsistent with the expected positive relation between parental involvement and child adjustment, the reactive hypothesis is often used. The reactive hypothesis claims that any negative correlation or relation between parental involvement and academic achievement stems from a reactive parental involvement strategy, whereby a student who has academic or behavioral difficulties at school encourages greater levels of parental involvement (e.g., Epstein, 1988, Epstein, 1992). For instance, McNeal (1999) found that parents talking to teachers was negatively related to children's academic achievement and speculated that parents could use this particular practice reactively when their children needed help. However, most of the research that has found negative relations between parental involvement and child outcomes has relied on cross-sectional studies, in which the causal links between parental involvement and child outcomes have been unclear. Studies that have examined the bidirectional relations between parental involvement and child outcomes using longitudinal research design have typically used only one dimension to investigate the associations between either home-based or school-based involvement and child outcomes (Ciping, Silinskas, Wei, & Georgiou, 2015; Daniel, Wang, & Berthelsen, 2016; McNeal, 2012). Thus, further studies that use longitudinal designs to assess the relations between parental involvement in both home and school contexts and child outcomes are desired.

Culturally responsive research conducted to understand the features of parenting in different cultures is important for successfully enhancing learning opportunities for children from diverse cultural backgrounds. The majority of studies that have confirmed a positive relation between parental involvement and child outcomes across racial groups relied on using samples of minority children from a single country (see Jeynes, 2007 for a review). As a result, relatively less is known about parental involvement in non-Western cultures outside of the United States. In particular, Asian parents are known to have high expectations for their children, to be highly responsive to their children's needs, and as a result to be involved more frequently in their children's education (Cheung & Pomerantz, 2011). With such parenting behaviors in mind, it would be interesting to examine whether parental involvement has a similar influence in Asian societies and whether children's developmental characteristics influence parental involvement.

To our knowledge, only one such study has been conducted in China to investigate the cross-lagged relations between parental involvement and children's school outcomes (Ciping et al., 2015). Its results suggest that children's reading and mathematics abilities negatively predict informal home literacy activities and formal home numeracy activities, respectively, such that parents engage more frequently in home activities when they notice that their children experience learning difficulties, to meet the expectations of the school system (Ciping et al., 2015). Their findings highlight the fact that parents modify their use of parenting techniques in the home learning environment based on their children's actual behavior. However, like most studies that have relied heavily on the reports of single informants on the behavior of parents in one dimension of involvement (e.g., Baker, Cameron, Rimm-Kaufman, & Grissmer, 2012; Cooper, 2010; Durand, 2011), Ciping et al. (2015) fail to capture the other dimensions of involvement (i.e., school-based involvement) and their bidirectional relations with children's achievement. We examine the bidirectional relations between home- and school-based involvement and their effects on children's school adjustment during the transition from kindergarten to primary school in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, with a population of 7 million, was a British colony before it became a Special Administrative Region of China in 1997. Unlike other cities in China, Hong Kong has high autonomy in developing and implementing contemporary educational policies due to the “one country, two systems” policy. Hong Kong is regarded as the most Westernized and urban city in China and probably has more Western educational influences, such as the inclusion of parents in children's education, than other cities in mainland China. All kindergartens in Hong Kong are privately run and provide services for children from three to six years old. Nearly all children in Hong Kong start kindergarten at age three. Most Hong Kong kindergartens operate on a half-day basis. The aim of kindergarten education in Hong Kong is to nurture children to attain all-round development and to thereby lay the foundation for their future learning. However, with the exception of a few schools, nearly all primary schools operate on a whole-day basis. Students are expected to master a wide range of academic skills in primary schools, such as biliterate (Chinese and English) and trilingual (Cantonese, English, and Putonghua) abilities. As in most other childhood educational contexts, Hong Kong kindergartens and primary schools differ in terms of their learning environments, curricula, pedagogies, routines, teacher expectations, and peer groups, with the transition from kindergarten to primary school representing a major milestone for children during which they must cope with various adaptation problems (Wong, 2003).

The Hong Kong Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum (Curriculum Development Institute, 2006) states that the transition between kindergarten and primary school should be taken into consideration in the pre-primary education curriculum. The Guide to the Pre-primary Curriculum also highlights the establishment of a home-school partnership as an important strategy for supporting young children's positive development. However, the design and implementation of transitional activities (e.g., primary school visits and parent seminars) and the involvement opportunities and resources allocated to involve parents varies across different kindergartens in Hong Kong. For instance, while most kindergartens require parents to complete home activity packets and read with their children, only some kindergartens have a Parent Teacher Association to coordinate and plan parent activities and very few kindergartens have a parent resource room or a parent liaison staff. As a result, researchers found that Hong Kong parents desired more involvement opportunities during the transition period to facilitate their child's adjustment outcomes (Chan, 2010, Chan, 2012; Lau, 2013). Hence, studying parental involvement in Hong Kong is timely and important for providing insights about what can be done to facilitate quality education during the early years. Most importantly, as nearly all kindergarten-aged children in Hong Kong attend kindergarten (Rao & Li, 2009), Hong Kong is an interesting context to examine how parental involvement affects children's school adjustment beyond preschool.

Section snippets

This study

We used a two-wave longitudinal design involving multiple informants to examine the bidirectional relations between parental involvement by mothers and children's school adjustment. First, based on prior theory and research, we expected mothers' involvement to predict subsequent school adjustment assessed using child tests and teacher ratings. However, we also expected school adjustment to predict mothers' involvement in primary school. Findings of this study will have potential implications

Participants

Stratified random sampling was used to recruit 10 kindergartens in each of the three strata (i.e., high, middle, and low income) developed based on the median monthly household incomes of the districts (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2012). Invitation letters were sent to kindergartens and phone calls were made to the principals. Eleven kindergartens (three from the high-income stratum and four from both the middle- and low-income strata) agreed to participate in the study. A total

Results

Estimated means and standard errors for all the variables derived through the mixed model analyses are presented in Table 4. The mixed model analyses showed no significant effects of child sex for the three measures of mothers' involvement. However, maternal self-reports of home-school conferencing increased over time, F(1, 633) = 11.90, p < .001. Teacher ratings of maternal home-school conferencing showed no significant effects of child sex or timepoint. For the child measures, both cognitive

Discussion

The aims of this study were to differentiate the bidirectional relations between mothers' involvement practices and children's school adjustment during the transition from kindergarten to primary school in a Hong Kong sample. Because only two of the 12 cross-lagged paths examined were significant, the results should be interpreted with caution. Below we discuss both the significant and non-significant findings.

Only one significant finding emerged to support the hypothesis that mothers'

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grant Council [ECS 28401914].

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