Longitudinal data from 1,425 U.S. and 1,755 German students in grades 7-10 revealed that the influence of family background is more pronounced on early-schooling decisions. In both countries, achievement was the best predictor of career decisions. The cumulative process of social background influences is stronger in Germany. (Contains 49…

Surveys of 110 inner-city Hispanic adolescent girls referred for psychiatric assessment and their mothers found that the quality of mother/daughter communication in general was more useful in predicting onset of sexual experiences than aspects of later sexual experiences. However, specific communication about sexuality was not related to…

Investigates the extent to which parents' well-being and parenting styles provide a basis of the development of their children's cognitive and behavioral strategies in primary school. Reveals that maternal depressive symptomatology was associated with their children's use of maladaptive strategies, whereas maternal authoritative parenting styles…

Used data from Iowa Youth and Families Project to examine parental influences on ninth and tenth graders' community activities. Found that although both parental modeling and parental reinforcement made significant differences in the extracurricular activity involvement of their children, parental reinforcement was most consequential when parents…

Presents a study that draws data from a five-year project that used parent involvement to raise pupil achievement in literacy and numeracy. Focuses on the schools' rationales for why they invested in parental involvement. Relates the data to sociological understandings of how teachers support children's learning and teachers' conceptions of…

Parental involvement is seen as an important strategy for the advancement of the quality of education. The ultimate objective of this is to expand the social and cognitive capacities of pupils. In addition, special attention is paid to the children of low-educated and ethnic minority parents. Various forms of both parental and school-initiated…

Over the past few years, the Times of India has published many articles and editorials on the topic of childhood stress. According to Ramanathan (2002), a recent study conducted by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences reveals that nearly 35 percent of children ages 8-14, especially in urban areas, are stressed enough to need clinical…

Drawing on the notion of linked lives, this study examined the effects of stability and change in maternal circumstance on developmental trajectories of antisocial behavior in children 4 to 7 years of age. Using data from a national sample of young mothers and growth curve analysis, the study demonstrated that early maternal circumstances…

Education for citizenship has the teaching of social and moral education, community involvement and political literacy at its core. Perhaps more than any other curriculum area, the influence of the home is significant, yet little is known of the extent to which parents support the teaching of citizenship. This paper presents the findings from a…

Overwhelming evidence shows that family involvement--both in school and at home--has a positive impact on student achievement. Researchers have found that parental involvement tends to drop off when students enter middle school. Research also shows that does not have to be the case. In this article, the author discusses the school-family-community…

The areas considered in this chapter have to do with the aims of family socialization, the nature of influence, linking multiple sources of influence, and the range of families and contexts used as a basis for accounts of socialization. In each area, moving beyond restrictive assumptions opens up new ways of thinking and new research questions.

The purpose of the study was to examine the interaction between parental smoking status and parental attitudes, as measured by positive parental concern, on the risk of adolescent cigarette smoking. Parental smoking and parental concern about smoking were measured in a cross-sectional study of 37,244 students, a random sample of Maryland middle…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine whether two vocabulary measures were appropriate for the evaluation of African American children and children whose mothers have low education levels, regardless of gender. Method: Data were collected for 210 high-risk, preschool children from a southeastern state in the United States on the…

This study tested a culturally informed model of academic well-being for 278 Latino youth. We examined detrimental effects of discriminatory experiences and protective effects of social support on self-reported academic outcomes. Models specified main and buffering effects of social support and compared contributions of support provided by…

Children of Indian descent have won first place in five of the last seven years of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and this year they made up 30 of the 273 contestants, a proportion many times larger than their 0.66% of the population. These achievements were possible because some Indian parents can become obsessive when it comes to the…