Family Dynamics

The state of family dynamics and the family interactions have important associations with students’ academic motivation, performance, and achievement.

  

According to Rand researchers (Grissmer, Kirby, Berends, and Williamson), the most important family characteristic influencing student performance is parents’ education. For example, students with one or two college-educated parents performed much better than students whose parents were not high school graduates. (rand.org) If the parents are educated, they will be able to create a supportive learning environment for their children. 

In the other hand, single-parent families who are not high school graduates and who have a low income will most of the time see their children’s performance decrease. Students in single-parent families have lower academic performance. They will be more tempted to follow peer pressure and they will end up drooping out from high school. Therefore, single parents may be unable to contribute to schools because of work commitments. 

In addition, today’s families spend less time together because both parents work outside the home and they often have more than one job. Parents have less time to become full partners in their children’s education. Working parents cannot always be home to ensure that the homework gets done. They do not have the time to verbally communicate in a loving and generous way their expectations to their children. Both working parents have no time to encourage children to read and to promote school attendance. Also, they have no time for school based activities such as attending PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, concerts, and other schools events.

 In the whole, one of the most important ways to improve students’ performance would be to increase parents’ and families involvement. 

Parent involvement makes an enormous impact on student’s performance and academic achievement. Effective teachers are fully aware of the benefits of parent and family involvement. When there is a greater involvement from parents, students’ performance do increase.