Including fathers in the picture

About this book

The main goal of my dissertation was to examine the contribution of fathers to their children's academic outcomes and father-mother differences in terms of their involvement in their children's education across various contexts including China and Western countries. In my first study, a meta-analysis, I investigated the relative strength of the association between educational involvement of fathers versus mothers and achievement of school-age children (K to 12). This study showed that father involvement was positively associated with student achievement and the relationship between involvement and achievement was equally strong for fathers and mothers. Moderator analyses across the different types of involvement suggested mother-father differences in school involvement. The strength of the relationship between involvement and achievement did not differ by students' ethnicity or gender for either mothers or father. However, for mothers, involvement and achievement was more strongly associated for students in secondary school than elementary school students. In my second study, I examined how mothers' and fathers' homework help were linked to the academic achievement of junior high school students and their later college attainment. In this mixed-method study spanning over ten years, I used two waves of survey and follow-up interview data based on a sample of 738 students enrolled in eighth or ninth grade at a junior high school in Dalian, urban China. This study suggested clear differences in the ways in which mothers and fathers get involved in their children's education, with implications for children's achievement and college attainment. Mothers were found to be more frequently and regularly involved with their children's education while fathers' involvement was sporadic and the strategies they used sometimes harsh. Findings also suggested that although parents born in the 1950s and 1960s in the People's Republic of China had too little education to offer much help with the content of schoolwork after primary school, parenting strategies that emphasized encouragement of and reasoning with children were positive.