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Does Father Involvement Predict School Success?

Monday Aug 17, 2009

Conventional wisdom, supported by some research, says that parent involvement in children's schooling is associated with improved academic achievement. Father involvement has been shown to be beneficial for children in a number of ways, and father absence is a documented risk factor for poor school performance. So it seems logical to conclude that father involvement would be associated with improved school outcomes for children. Why, then, did a recent study find an inverse relationship between father involvement and school success?

Brent McBride, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with several colleagues, analyzed father involvement and school success data from the Child Development Supplement of an ongoing study called the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). They found that early father involvement predicted later father involvement. That is, fathers who were engaged in their child's life during the preschool school years displayed more school involvement a few years later. However, in this study, father involvement did not predict school achievement. In fact, there was a negative association between paternal school involvement and school achievement.

Why? The short answer lies partly in the type of information available to researchers in the PSID data set. The school involvement indicators used in the study did not include behaviours like helping with homework or other home-based learning activities. Instead most were about attending certain types of school activities. About half of the indicators were related to formal kinds of involvement: talking to school counselors or attending formal conferences with teachers or principals. These are things that tend to happen when a child is having problems, says McBride. "In these families men typically don't become engaged in the school process until there's a problem. Then you have the big conference where both parents come in, sit down and sort everything out."

The key point is that this type of father involvement, which can beneficial in terms of supporting students experiencing school problems, is most likely to take place when a father has been actively involved in the child's life from an early age. "If a father hasn't been engaged by the time the child goes off to school he's less likely to become engaged when there is a problem at school," McBride says.

McBride said these analyses also suggest that we need to think more about the specific roles fathers play as parents. "We need to look at the bigger picture, because these analyses all point to the same conclusion: that men and women each contribute uniquely to child outcomes," he says.

The results of McBride's research were published in an article titled The Differential Impact of Early Father and Mother Involvement on Later Student Achievement in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology.

McBride's co-authors were U. of I. students W. Justin Dyer and Ying Liu, and Geoffrey L. Brown, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.