ABSTRACT
This chapter most directly links to the large interdisciplinary literature on parental involvement in education (with parental engagement and family–school partnerships being more contemporary alternative conceptualizations). Parental involvement encompasses a wide variety of behaviors that take place in multiple settings, such as the home (e.g., engaging in cognitively stimulating activities with children, such as shared reading), preschools and schools setting (e.g., meeting with teachers about children’s progress, volunteering at school), and in the community (e.g., finding positive extracurricular activities for children, exposing children to cultural resources, such as museums). Such behaviors also vary across developmental time, declining in many ways but also evolving into different forms as children’s needs change with age. For example, playing stimulating games with children is more important during early childhood than in adolescence, with helping children choose curricular options in school more common during adolescence than early childhood. Finally, both levels of engagement in and the meanings attached to parental involvement behaviors are highly context specific, differing across diverse segments of the population with diverse cultural settings for child development. For example, affluent European-American parents tend to emphasize the value of being visibly active in their children’s schools, whereas Asian-American immigrant parents are more likely to emphasize involvement at home and in the community as crucial (Christenson and Sheridan, 2001; Epstein, 2011; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997).
