Is there such a thing as too much parental involvement in a student’s education? Lack of parental involvement is often cited anecdotally as an impediment to student achievement. On the other hand, so-called “helicopter parents” can run their children’s education like drill sergeants. The goal is educational and occupational success, but there is increasing concern that such intense involvement could instead lead to dangerous dead ends. A new study in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds much-needed data to the discussion. (Disclaimer: The study is from Germany, so mind the culture gap.)
There have been a number of studies over the last forty years looking at parents’ aspirations for their children, which is a useful way for psychological and sociological researchers to measure parental involvement. However, the current study’s authors noted two gaps in previous research. First, temporal ordering of effects was not generally considered (i.e., it was assumed that parents’ involvement led to certain academic outcomes in the future, but the current research supposes that kids’ past achievement could lead to more/different parental involvement in the future). Moreover, little effort was made to separate parental aspiration (“We want our child to obtain this grade”) from parental expectation (“We believe our child can obtain this grade”). Often only one or the other question was considered, or both were conflated into one measure. The current study not only looked at those questions separately, but made the difference between them its subject. Remember that point; it’s important later.
The researchers carried out a five-year study with 3,530 students and their parents in Bavaria. It included the annual German math test for the kids and a survey for the parents. Parental aspiration and expectation were measured via separate questions as worded above, both on a scale of 1–6 . While a majority of parents in the first year expressed aspirations that matched their expectations, more than 30 percent of parents reported significantly higher aspiration than expectation for their children—a gap called “overaspiration.” Parental overaspiration was negatively correlated with students’ math achievement in that first year.
Resurveying parents on expectation and aspiration each year attempted to account for temporal ordering (“resetting” expectations and aspirations before the test each year); overaspiration did tend to lessen over time. But it never disappeared entirely. Remember that overaspiration is the gap between aspiration and expectation. And despite some tempering, many parents continued to have far higher aspirations for their children’s success than expectations that their children actually would reach that aspired-to score. Call it hope, call it delusion, call it whatever you want: Overaspiration persisted throughout the study. We know that high expectations are generally good for kids, but the mismatch seems to have cut against both parent and child in this study, characterized by the researchers as “poisonous” to math achievement.
These findings appear to apply to students regardless of achievement level. The German education system includes separate schools for students on three “tracks” based on their entry-level academic ability, and the aspiration study included proportional numbers of students from all three tracks. The findings were the same. Bearing in mind that previous studies conflated expectation and aspiration data, the researchers also ran the same differentiated analysis with comparable variables in another data set—from the Educational Longitudinal Study conducted in the U.S. by the National Center for Educational Statistics from 2002 to 2004—that closely replicated the findings from Germany.
The researchers raise a number of questions needing further study, especially regarding the way aspirations and expectations are made manifest between parents and children (not to mention the possibility of a similar effect between teachers and students), but this study seems to suggest that parental involvement may have limited effectiveness on academic outcomes if it isn’t based on a realistic balance of expectation and aspiration.
SOURCE: Kou Murayama et al., “Don’t Aim Too High for Your Kids: Parental Overaspiration Undermines Students’ Learning in Mathematics,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (November 2015).
