Parental involvement in adolescent schooling: A proximal process with transcontextual validity

Current theorizing has focused almost exclusively on searching for differences by culture, class, and gender, with scant attention to identifying proximal processes that transcend context. Yet in this study of 10,000 high school students, parents who were more involved in their adolescents' schooling had offspring who performed better in school, irrespective of the parents' gender or education and the children's gender, ethnicity, of family structure. In univariate analyses, the levers of parental school involvement varied across ecological niches (e.g., parental education and family structure), yet the benefits to adolescents school success were relatively constant. In multivariate analyses, mothers' school involvement exerted a larger effect an grades among students whose mothers had fewer resources than among students whose mothers were more advantaged.