Are your Parents to Blame?: Parental Involvement\u27s Effects on College Academic Achievement

Parents are seen as one of the main influences in a child’s life. In so many ways, children are affected by their upbringing. In an educational setting, children can use their experiences from their home lives to further themselves in school. Family dynamics and the degree of parental involvement in educational aspects of their children’s lives impact how their children perform in school. To test this hypothesis in an educational setting, the current study used current College of Wooster students and their parents, to collect data through survey methods. The surveys measured degrees of parental involvement, in the parents’ perspectives and the students’ perspectives and parenting style (Baumrind, 1971). It was hypothesized that the students with parents who score highly on the parental involvement measures and score high in the characteristics of Authoritative parenting, will also have higher academic achievement than the students who have parents who score lower on the parental involvement measures and who have more permissive or authoritarian parenting characteristics. Results showed that there were no significant results linking parental involvement or parenting style directly to students’ academic achievement, but did indicate certain aspects of involvement that can indirectly influence academic achievement