Leveling the Home Advantage: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parental Involvement in Elementary School

In the past two decades, a great deal of energy has been dedicated to improving children's education by increasing parents' involvement in school. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of parental involvement is uneven. Whereas policy makers and theorists have assumed that parental involvement has wide-ranging positive consequences, many studies have shown that it is negatively associated with some children's outcomes. This article uses data from the children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to estimate time-lagged growth models of the effect of several types of parental involvement on scores on elementary school achievement tests and the Behavioral Problems Index. The findings suggest that parental involvement does not independently improve children's learning, but some involvement activities do prevent behavioral problems. Interaction analyses suggest that the involvement of parents with low socioeconomic status may be more effective than that of parents with high socioeconomic status.