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    Parents are the greatest influence on children’s learning, but how can this influence be harnessed?

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    Demonstrate to your children the value of education – that’s one of the most important ways a parent can encourage their learning. This is true the world over, although parents have various ways to highlight this value. If parents succeed in convincing their children of the importance of education and can mobilize the resources to provide support, children typically stay in school and do well.
    Many of the important contributions from parents do not require money or qualifications. Support can begin with a simple question: “What are you learning about at school?” Parents can bring an extra perspective to what children are studying: “I don’t know if you have heard about this…?” can open a discussion. For example, parents might mention climate change and ask how it fits in with, say, science at school. They can extend what the child is doing in class and bring it home: “What do you think we can do? Can we recycle?” These conversations express that parents value education and support their children.

    “Parental involvement in children’s education is important in every country. However, the way that involvement takes place varies greatly.”

    Parents also set an example. They can let children see them reading for themselves, so parents are not always on their phones and do not leave a television on constantly in the background. Reading with children, especially in the early years, is highly beneficial. But if parents have low literacy skills, just talking with children and telling them stories, even if not from a book, help build language skills.
    Parental involvement varies globally
    Parental involvement in children’s education is important in every country. However, the way that involvement takes place varies greatly. In some low-income countries, where even low school fees for uniforms, books, or transport can break the family budget, parents show their commitment to their children’s learning by making considerable sacrifices to meet the costs. Sometimes, they manage it only for some members of the family: Perhaps the younger siblings are sent to school while the older ones work to pay the expenses. In Kenya, the best schools tend to be boarding, with children living away from home for many months. If they can, parents show how they value education by paying the fees even though that means losing out on face-to-face childrearing.
    In the United States, one of the most important parental contributions to children’s learning is choosing where the family lives. There are thousands of individual school systems, with different books, curricula, and pedagogical strategies; Americans with financial resources often decide where to make their homes based on the school system they want for their children. The location of a school matters much less in China, where schools are more standardized, and where there is a national curriculum and national pedagogical strategies and textbooks. Parents in China and other Asian countries such as the Philippines and Thailand tend to focus more on home support, helping with homework and making sure that children have a designated time and place to study.
    Photo: Pass the Torch. Creative Commons.

    Mobilizing parents’ educational input
    How can formal education use parents effectively – harness their social capital – for learning? Cultural norms vary. In some places, such as the United States, parents are  expected to volunteer in their children’s classrooms, work at book fairs or other events, or help with fundraising. Jordan has mandatory parents’ councils, which involve parents directly with administrators and teachers. Many countries have variations of this concept. Sometimes the goal is for teachers to communicate what is happening in the classroom and guide parents on how they can support their children’s learning. These initiatives generally work better if they are universally available and non-stigmatizing, rather than focusing solely on parents of children who are struggling. However, some countries (e.g., China) have eschewed these models and generally, parents are not seen in classrooms or at schools there.
    Few models harness the support fathers can bring to their children’s education – in fact, much of the research and practice related to parental involvement focuses on mothers. But some countries have recognized the potential of involving fathers. In Jordan, when organizers of a parenting program saw that success mainly involved mothers, imams were recruited to spread messages about parenting to dads at Friday prayers.
    The greatest influence is at home 
    Home is typically where parents make the most difference in their children’s education. Parents often ask how much help they should give with homework. It is good to lend a hand if children are struggling at school, with the parent acting like a tutor to help children understand or practice reading with text support. But some parents go too far and take over, making children feel that they cannot do it on their own. Children need to feel efficacious.
    School learning systems can clash with family and cultural systems. This is true where schools adopt, for example, English or French as the language of instruction, when children are fluent in different mother tongues and much less able to communicate in these other languages. In the Philippines, for example, new laws require instruction during primary school in mother tongue languages because many parents were uncomfortable with the main languages being English or Filipino, which prevented them from being involved in their children’s education. In many countries, language policy has disconnected learning at school from interactions at home and hindered parents’ ability to be involved in their children’s education.

    “A major issue in education – which parents can influence considerably – is maintaining children’s mental health and well-being.”

    Parents can support mental health
    A major issue in education – which parents can influence considerably – is maintaining children’s mental health and well-being. Placing a high emphasis on academic achievement can lead to anxiety and symptoms of depression in children. This often occurs where high-stakes examinations provide a narrow gateway to further opportunities, perhaps because a country has limited resources for funding education or elite institutions cherry-pick students.
    High-stakes testing, particularly in Asian countries, fosters concerns that academic success is achieved at the expense of children’s mental health. Sweden offers a contrasting example, thanks partly to its wealth, with a good intersection between family values and the school system: Both support students having varied paths of study that reflect their individual interests. And Sweden does not have the barriers to higher education found in some countries, which generate so much examination anxiety.
    It is much easier to highlight parental practices – such as physical punishment – that are universally bad for children than it is to identify evidence on which practices are universally good. But the level of variation suggests that parents and education systems should look elsewhere and ask: “Should we try that here?”
    Header photo: Nenad Stojkovic. Creative Commons. More

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      Race and racism: the blind spot in research on poverty and child development

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      Amidst the intertwined pandemics of COVID-19 and racism, something unprecedented should be happening in research on poverty and children’s development. Scholars should be looking in the mirror and starting to see their blind spots regarding race and racism. Scholars of color (who are in the minority) have been aware of this for years. Others are only just starting to see how their own training hinged on certain models that are White and WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, Democratic). They are starting to see how their own mentors reinforced privilege by allowing access to pipelines of opportunities that looked like their own. They are beginning to understand how their own research about “others” (i.e., people from places, experiences, and histories unlike their own) hinges on theories, methods, and importantly, assumptions that excluded the realities, experiences, and expertise of the very people being studied, particularly with respect to race and racism.
      Blind spots are hard to see; by definition, they are about omission. Yet blind spots – such as clinical color blindness, overlooking issues of race and racism, or consigning race to a static variable – contribute to the creation of future scholarship and science, and to the fostering of explanations that can be terribly misguided. Such blind spots are harder still to address. Training and education – our typical responses — are only as effective as accepting what is reflecting back from the mirror and our efforts to continually shift and re-shift those reflections.

      “The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate injustice.”

      Historically, the neglect of race and racism in research on poverty and child development has been shaped by denial and fear of race — as immutable – carrying the burden of explaining poverty. This neglect is shaped by over-application of models that reinforce notions that being poor is less a condition of society and more a condition of being a member of a lesser-than-non-White group, whether Black, Latino, or indigenous in the U.S. context. And scholars with good intentions unintentionally began practicing “assimilationist” racism, preferring to ignore the issue rather than face it head on. The recent publication of Lawrence Mead’s “Poverty and Culture” in a peer-reviewed journal showed that, 50 years after Senator Daniel Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, all these blind spots are surprisingly alive and well in poverty research.
      How can family and child development scholars build a dynamic and resilient world view and a professional architecture to directly address race and racism in their research? How can scholars disrupt the perpetuation of inaccurate ideologies, and recalibrate power imbalances to optimize discourse and guide policy?
      First, scholarship of and for children and families should stay grounded in lived experience. Data, whether in the form of numbers or words, do not emerge free of history and context; history and context should be the starting point. The lived experience of families in poverty intersects with experiences of race, immigration status, and the structures and systems that perpetuate exclusion and racism. At the same time, lived experience is the daily routines, survival strategies and resistance to oppression that parents, caregivers, workers, educators, and children and youth engage in every day. Research on poverty should be enriched by greater integration of quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods literatures on intersectionality; racial socialization and identity; experiences of and responses to discrimination; representation, racial composition, and intergroup relations in  the contexts of work, schools, and media, and funds of knowledge and traditions of socialization in racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse communities. This list can go on. These areas of research are robust and growing, each typically with both basic developmental and applied/intervention studies. Research on mainstream poverty needs to change and view these emerging areas as core, not neglected.
      Photo: Unsplash.

      Second, as scholars, we can surround ourselves in authentic ways with others who are outside our inner disciplinary circles, ask for and be open to accepting authentic critiques, and strive toward richer research questions that may generate more powerful implications. Poverty scholarship can go deeper than controls for race, considering it a fixed and context-free characteristic. How can experiences of racism at household, neighborhood, structural, or policy levels be integrated into policy research on poverty and child development? Would our proposals for anti-poverty policy be more effective if they integrated attention to racial segregation and other disparities by race in opportunity and social mobility? We can be much bolder in straying from conventional silos and daring to cross disciplines and levels of analysis. Race and racism are inherent at all layers of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, from macro-level structures to micro-level interactions. But because poverty researchers and race researchers largely do not overlap or collaborate, a number of novel questions are neglected. What would it mean to address structural sources of racism in tandem with other areas of anti-poverty policy? Can social movements change the linked and mutually reinforcing narratives around race and poverty?
      Third, scholarship can and should start with understanding and questioning existing assumptions and pushing toward changing these defaults. Are we assuming that every child is born on a level playing field even though Black-White racial differences in household wealth are large and constrain the ability of Black families to respond to economic shocks? Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?
      Fourth, we can diversify the poverty policy and scholarship research “workforce.” At any established public policy and social science, population, and developmental science research conference where poverty scholars convene, you witness a sea of White people, sometimes predominantly White male people. Contrast this with convenings focused on race, ethnicity, or immigration and child development: You see scholars who are closer to representing the diversity of the United States. A much more robustly diverse pipeline of scholars across disciplines is required. Fellowship programs recently initiated by the Russell Sage Foundation, and those set up years ago by the Foundation for Child Development, the American Psychological Association, and the National Institutes of Health, are important first steps toward diversifying the pipeline of scholars, but are only a start (and will fail as a singular source of interventions). If admissions to graduate training programs; hiring processes in research institutions and universities; and the topics of research valued in curricula, departments, and peer review do not change priorities, we will continue to see the artificial and ultimately harmful divide between research on poverty and race among both scholars and scholarship.

      “Are we naïve in assuming that enhancing income — the conventional realm of safety net policies – is enough to address intergenerational disparities of wealth, without concurrent efforts to adjust the many tax and transfer policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy?”

      Fifth, we can be louder and more active in our universities as we pursue or engage in external funding, in our roles as peer reviewers and editors, and as participants and leaders of professional organizations. Scholars who have profited from existing systems can and should demand more change toward inclusion. This opportunity to lead brings together the substance, messages, and models, explicit and implicit, conveyed by our research. This is an opportunity to step away from privilege and question how the public profile and output of your work is framed through an anti-racist lens. This is also an opportunity to create mechanisms – publishing avenues, grants, forums for speaking engagements — that were previously closed.
      Addressing race and racism in research on poverty and children’s development is going to be hard. However, the rewards will be full and rich, and will ultimately increase the impact of developmentally informed anti-poverty policies and practices. Our work will otherwise stagnate if we continue with siloed and segregated approaches, dipping into the same tools and perspectives that have shaped poverty research to date. That is, if we do not actively strive for change now, anti-racist poverty policy will not make progress. With such progress, we will be better positioned to overcome inequality in race and income, instead of chaotically reacting to public health and economic shocks like those triggered by COVID-19.
      Header photo: Miki Jourdan. Creative Commons.  More

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      The negative impacts of physical punishment and psychological aggression on child development are similar in high-, middle- and low-income countries

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      The increased focus on the rights of children worldwide has drawn greater attention to child maltreatment and the lost developmental potential of children who live in difficult social and economic circumstances. Yet depending on economic resources and political and social will, attention to physical discipline remains elusive in several low- and middle-income countries. In the main, such discussions are much needed at the societal and local levels in many of the poorer nations of the world to further advance the rights and welfare of children in today’s global community.
      Across cultural communities, parents and caregivers use different levels of psychological control (e.g., making children feel worthless, guilty), physical control (e.g., restraining, hitting children), and behavioral control (e.g., setting limits, offering structure) during childrearing. In high-income countries, high levels of psychological, physical, and behavioral control affect children’s social adjustment and academic performance negatively. However, it remains unclear whether these effects generalize to low- and middle-income countries, where endorsement of the use of physical punishment can be high. At the same time, there appears to be a good deal of confusion among parents across low- and middle-income countries about physical punishment and discipline. Physical punishment is meant to inflict pain in the child as a way of dealing with behavioral difficulties and noncompliance. By contrast, discipline is meant to teach children desirable ways of behaving through redirection, explanation, reasoning, and induction.
      Photo: Unsplash.

      As august bodies (e.g., American Academy of Pediatrics, 2018) and researchers continue to warn about the developmental risks associated with physical discipline, it is beneficial to weigh in on what we know about the impact of harsh parenting in the developing countries of Africa. Over the last two decades, we have assessed the impact of harsh parenting across multilingual Caribbean countries. In diverse Caribbean countries, there is high endorsement of the use of physical discipline, but the outcomes of physical discipline on children’s social and cognitive skills are inconsistent. Here, we share findings from an analysis in about half of the countries in Africa of the links between maternal use of nonphysical discipline (explaining), harsh physical discipline (hitting child with an object), physical discipline (spanking), and psychological aggression (berating child) and preschoolers’ social skills, literacy skills, and behavioral difficulties. Our analysis drew on the UNICEF Micro Indicator Surveys of 32,817 biological mothers and their children in 25 African countries: Algeria, Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Swaziland, Togo, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe.
      What implications might harsh and non-harsh forms of discipline have for child development in Africa? In our research, a high percentage of mothers used explanations with children, but endorsement and use of physical discipline were also prevalent across countries. Across countries, harsh physical discipline, physical discipline, and psychological aggression were each associated with higher levels of behavioral difficulties such as biting, hitting, and kicking other children and adults. That is, berating children had adverse effects on children that were similar to using physical discipline. Not surprisingly, non-physical discipline that involved the use of explanations and redirection was positively associated with children’s literacy skills. Only harsh physical discipline was negatively associated with children’s social skills, such as displaying independence and following directions.

      “Some researchers have argued that in cultural communities where physical punishment is seen as an appropriate method of discipline, the effects of harsh discipline on child development should be less severe. Our analysis offered little support for such a proposition.”

      Some researchers have argued that in cultural communities where physical punishment is seen as an appropriate method of discipline, the effects of harsh discipline on child development should be less severe — the normativeness hypothesis. Our analysis offered little support for such a proposition and instead suggested that harsh forms of maternal discipline have direct negative consequences for children’s behavior and early literacy skills across the African countries we studied.
      These findings from 25 low- and middle-income African countries add to the growing body of evidence on the harmful effects of harsh parenting practices on child development. Moreover, developmental risks associated with harsh forms of discipline become magnified in families with poor material resources, poor access to health care, in the presence of neighborhood difficulties (e.g., violence), and with limited access to preschool education. It is difficult for children to show prudential interest in their social world and moral concern for others when parents hit, slap, pull, and belittle them.
      Header photo: Unsplash. More

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      How do young children make sense of death?

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      Children construct knowledge about death. They actively ask questions, they observe events and behaviors around them, they read books and watch films. By the age of six, most children seem to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of death, according to a recent review of the research.  This is earlier than once thought: the famous early researcher Jean Piaget (1896-1980) proposed […] More

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      Globalisation may transform children’s learning in traditional societies

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      Intelligent, curious toddlers are easy to spot in Western societies. Typically, they announce themselves with an endless string of “why” questions: “Why are we eating these?”; “Why are we getting in the car?”; “Why are you going to work?” But this isn’t how children’s learning operates in much of the world. We have found that “why” questions, seeking explanations, are […] More

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      Children learning from each other in hunter-gatherer societies offers lessons to the global north

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      The phenomenon of children learning mainly from each other – a typical practice in many hunter-gatherer communities – may provide important lessons about how to prepare children in post-industrial societies for rapid change and uncertain futures. We have found that when children learn from other children in two sub-Saharan African forager societies, it fosters independence […] More