Parental Involvement in Their Children's Education

Abstract

Parental involvement in the children's education in our area is still an insufficiently researched construct. It can be implicitly concluded that parental involvement is something that happens by itself. However, referring to previous scientific research, the importance of this topic is also noticed through the positive relationship between desirable child outcomes, such as better school performance and parental involvement in their education. The family certainly plays a vital role in the student's school achievement, i.e., parents contribute to the child's cognitive development and academic achievement in various ways - preparing the child for school, transmitting educational values, modeling the child's self-confidence, establishing learning habits, and participating in school (Reić Ercegovac & Koludrović, 2010). Various scientific papers emphasize that the active participation of parents in the education of the child implies their physical presence and active participation (Sušanj Gregorović, 2018). There is still no unambiguous, generally accepted definition despite considerable research about parental involvement in the child's education. However, there is a consensus that it is a complex, multidimensional construct involving many parenting activities and behaviors related to the child's entire education and learning process (Epstein, 1990; Sušanj Gregorović, 2018). Parental involvement in the child's education is manifested in two ways: involvement in school activities and parental involvement in home activities. For the purposes of this paper, the second type of parental involvement is particularly important. According to the available literature, it is divided into two domains (Sušanj Gregorović, 2018), the first of which is parental participation in activities related to knowledge/skills development (Epstein, 2001; Henderson and Mapp, 2002; Ljubetić, 2014), while the other refers to participation in learning promotion activities that are not directly related to schoolwork (creating a cognitively stimulating family environment, providing educational materials, etc.) (Henderson and Mapp, 2002; Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997). This paper aims to contribute to the theoretical knowledge of the construct through a review of previous scientific knowledge and research.