Investing in children’s future: Cross-cultural perspectives and ideologies on parental involvement in education

Abstract

Drawing on two ethnographic studies of everyday middle-class family life in Los Angeles and Rome, this cross-cultural study examines parents’ practices of and beliefs about involvement in children’s education. It analyzes parents’ interviews and naturalistic video recordings of parent–child interactions at home to access parents’ perspectives on and ways of enacting involvement in school-related activities. Findings indicate that while the LA and Rome parents engaged in similar practices, their involvement in their children’s education was experienced differently and motivated by different assumptions. The article argues that differences in parents’ perceptions and practices reflect and reproduce marked cultural preferences and expectations within the local education systems and reveal distinct ideologies regarding childhood. Drawing on Halldén, the study proposes that LA parents tended to treat childhood as a period of ‘preparation’ for adulthood where there is more deliberate shaping of a child’s path, displaying a belief that children’s future much depends on present actions. Rome parents tended to view their child less as a project that they needed to work on, leaving room for children’s autonomy and freedom. Finally, the study argues that the examination of local sociocultural and institutional contexts offers a more comprehensive and situated interpretation of Italian and US parents’ choices and actions.

Keywords

Children’s education discourse ethnography ideology of childhood parental involvement

Introduction

Research on parenting practices has dedicated much attention to parental involvement in children’s lives, especially in their education (Cooper, 2007; Forsberg, 2009; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2001). A number of scholars have argued that home–school relations have intensified with increased expectations that parents get involved in their children’s school life and that this involvement is consonant with ‘good parenting’ (de Carvalho, 2001; Edwards, 2002; Hoffman, 2003; Kremer-Sadlik and Gutiérrez, 2013). Researchers have mainly focused on parents’ motivation for their involvement (Hoover-Dempsy et al., 2001; Van Zanten, 2003) and on parents’ everyday involvement practices (Forsberg, 2007, 2009; Sarre, 2013; Wingard, 2006). However, the effects of parental involvement on children’s learning and achievement have been inconclusive (Bempechat, 2004; Cooper and Lindsay, 2000; Solomon et al., 2002).

A number of researchers have recognized that parental involvement in education is strongly linked to social and cultural capital (de Carvalho, 2001; Kusserow, 2004; Lareau, 2003). Lareau (2003), in an ethnographic study of US working- and middle-class family life, found that middle-class parents tended to engage in a form of parenting she labeled ‘concerted cultivation’, in which they spent a lot of time assisting children with schoolwork, and engaging them in extra-curricular activities in order to deliberately ‘stimulate their children’s development and foster their cognitive and social skills’ (2003: 5). In contrast, the working-class parents in her study tended to exercise a ‘natural growth’ parenting style, in which they were less involved with their children’s school and activities, they exerted less control and offered more free time. In a related study, Weininger and Lareau (2003) analyzed conferences between teachers and parents of middle-class and working-class children, revealing that the former were much more able to advocate for their children and acquire important information useful for academic success. Van Zanten (2003) has shown how middle-class parents in France engage in exclusionary practices through careful selection of schools that will guarantee a homogeneous community with similar values to their own.

The present study adds to previous research on middle-class parental involvement in children’s education by taking an anthropological perspective that offers two distinct contributions. While most of the studies on parental involvement rely primarily on interviews (some exceptions are Forsberg, 2009; Lareau, 2003; and Wingard, 2006), our comparative study conducted in Los Angeles, California, and Rome, Italy combines ethnographic observations of parent–child interactions during homework activities in families’ homes with parents’ interviews in order to better understand the relation between parental ideologies and practices.

Anthropological ethnographic studies offer access to local understandings of routine actions and assumptions on childrearing that are shared and culturally valued within a certain community (Harkness and Super, 1996; Levine, 1990; Weisner, 2002). Furthermore, Hoffman (2003) notes that ideas about childrearing ‘are not isolated in some historically immune cultural space, but deeply implicated in on-going political, educational and social change processes’ (2003: 194). Thus, this study examines parents’ practices and beliefs regarding involvement in children’s homework in Los Angeles and Rome and situates these within the local educational institutions’ policies and expectations. It explores whether the middle-class parents in the two sites share practices and values and the extent to which these reflect local institutional ideologies regarding children’s education. Finally, we consider how these parental routines and perspectives orient toward different views of childhood. We begin by examining the institutional context of parental involvement in each country.

Parental involvement in children’s education: US context

The relationship between school and family in the US has been viewed as a partnership from early on. The nationwide Parent–Teacher Association, established in 1897, views parents and teachers as equal in their commitment and responsibility for children’s overall education and wellbeing (Parent–Teacher Association, 2012). This view has been reinforced over time and was cemented in 2000 when the Federal government stated its new goals for the Educate America Act to ‘strengthen the partnership between parents and professionals in meeting the educational needs of children … and the working relationship between home and school’ (US Department of Education, 2012a).

Other policies have further influenced parental engagement in children’s education. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (US Department of Education, 2012b), which links federal funding to students’ performance, has had a significant effect on students’ home life as children’s homework assignments and tests have increased significantly as a result of this Act (Nocon and Cole, 2006). As a consequence, parents feel that their help is necessary for their children to do well (Hoffman, 2003; Solomon et al., 2002). Government initiatives directly call for parents to be involved in their children’s education and schoolwork and indicate a direct link between this involvement and children’s academic success (US Department of Education, 2012c).

Studies that show positive relationships between parental involvement and children’s academic achievement and good study habits provide additional support for the institutional approach (Bempechat, 2004; Hill and Taylor, 2004). Parents’ involvement is also sought out directly by schools and teachers (Cooper, 2007; Walker and Hoover-Dempsey, 2008), reinforcing parents’ belief in the importance of their help and increasing their sense of efficacy. Popkewitz (2003) proposes that this form of parental involvement pedagogicalizes parents as surrogate teachers, who are being assigned specific tasks such as: turning children into better readers, increasing positive attitude toward school, and having better homework habits (Funkhouser et al., 2001).

Parental involvement in children’s education: The Italian context

The relationships between the school and the family in Italy are more ambiguous. In 1974 a law established ‘corporate boards’ (organi collegiali) for every school in the country with the purpose of including parents in educational matters and school decisions. In spite of the desire to foster partnership between the family and the school, manifested in laws, policies, and school reforms (Landri, 2009), studies have documented the existence of conflict, ambivalence, and mistrust between the two institutions (Dusi and Pati, 2011; Ligorio and Pontecorvo, 2010). For example, studies that focus on parent–teacher relations have indicated that elementary teachers often voiced frustration and a sense of failure in getting parents involved (Dusi, 2009). Parents were also resentful, complaining that teachers avoided explaining their rationale for practices such as homework assignments and grading and that they were not tuned to their children’s individual needs (Iannaccone and Marsico, 2007).

Homework, in particular, has figured as a main area where misunderstandings between families and the school are likely to occur. The dominant attitude toward homework found in the educational and political discourses in the Italian media emphasizes the burden of having the family too involved in homework (Meirieu, 2000). This was also evident in the Italian media coverage of French parents’ one-day boycott of homework assignments (Il Messaggero, 2012), in which the Italian Minister of Education publicly invoked the need to reduce the quantity of homework so to allow children more time to learn through other experiences (e.g. nature outings and museum visits), an opinion also strengthened by expert voices in pedagogical fields (Tonucci, 2005).

Parental involvement in children’s after-school activities

To further contextualize the cultural discourses on parental involvement, we consider what happens to children after the school day is over. Whereas, American children’s school day ends typically between 2:30 and 3:30, Italian children (particularly in metropolitan areas) can take advantage of an extended school-time that ends at 4:30 p.m. The Italian children’s time (particularly in the elementary school) appears more institutionalized, and this may leave their parents less burdened by the need to provide after-school care. At the same time, studies have indicated that both Italian and American children, in particular of middle-class background, spend time in the afternoon engaged in extra-curricular activities (Dunn et al., 2003; Hofferth and Sandberg, 2001; Istat, 2005, 2007; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). A cross-cultural, ethnographic study of Roman and Los Angelino parents’ engagement in such activities shows how local cultural ideologies regarding parenting shape the discourse and practices of parents regarding after-school activities (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). For instance, while the American parents in the study displayed a preference for ‘coaching’ their children, providing assessment of performance and encouraging them to excel in their activities, the Italian parents tended to underplay the importance of performance and expressed ambivalence regarding the efforts needed to compete and excel in children’s extra-curricular activities.

The ethnography of parent involvement

This study is part of an ethnographic, interdisciplinary research project conducted by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA (CELF) and at the University Sapienza in Rome (iCELF). CELF and iCELF were funded by the Sloan Foundation to study how middle-class parents and their children approach the challenges of balancing the demands of work, school, and family life. Families were recruited into the study through newspaper ads and were qualified through a screening interview. Each of the 32 Los Angeles families and the eight Rome families consisted of two parents, each working at least 30 hours per week, and two to three children with at least one between the ages of seven and 12. Out of the 63 LA and 14 Roman school-age children, 52 LA and eight Roman kids were in elementary school, eight LA and six Roman children were in middle school, and three LA and none of the Roman children were high schoolers. Previous studies have noted that parental involvement in children’s schoolwork diminishes with age (Sarre, 2013), and indeed this was true in our families as well. For that reason we focused our analysis mostly on parental assistance to the elementary children in our study.

Ascription to middle-class may be difficult given the different possible definitions (income, education, profession). In our study, families counted as middle-class if they owned their home and depended on their income to pay a monthly mortgage. Participants held a variety of professions from clerical and technical to high management and academic positions. Parents’ education ranged from high school to graduate degrees with the majority holding a bachelor’s degree.

Multiple methods were used to study the daily life of the LA and Roman families from the perspectives of parents and children. For this study, we draw on: (1) naturalistic video recordings of family life where two videographers followed parents and family members throughout their daily activities over four days across a week from early morning until the children went to bed; (2) in-depth ethnographic parent interviews (with the same parents that were filmed) on their views of their children’s education and life-long learning. Our analysis draws on linguistic anthropological perspectives that view language as a resource for and a product of social action and of speakers as social actors. Furthermore, language practices must be understood within the context of a community on speakers that share cultural norms and values (Duranti, 1997). As such, the LA and Roman parents’ discourses reflect their construction of a particular perspective on a topic (e.g. homework, parental involvement), exposing their socially and culturally informed meanings regarding parenting, childhood, and school.

Our interest in this article is to highlight how language forms used in interviews and in natural interaction might sustain, reproduce, or challenge particular versions of the social order and the notion of a person that is part of that order (e.g. what constitutes a good parent), and how these cultural practices (linguistic and otherwise) are related to larger societal institutions and concerns. As such, each of our data sets, however different in size, provides a rich terrain for the identification of local cultural worldviews and practices.

All the interviews and video-recorded interactions were transcribed. We analyzed all the sections that pertained to parental involvement in children’s education, noting the practices parents and children engaged in and attending to linguistic features that displayed participants’ attitude toward talk and practices related to school, homework, and parental involvement. The analysis presented here and the illustrative excerpts (limited in number due to lack of space) are representative of the recurring trends found in each locale, and checked for consistency across the interviews of the same data set. The most representative examples were selected. Our analysis was strengthened by the researchers’ ethnographic knowledge gained from fieldwork and from cross-examination and discussions of additional data sets in research groups in the different sites (Demuth and Fatigante 2012).

Doing homework

The LA and Roman parents’ involvement in their children’s education took various forms with the most common one being helping with homework assignments. The parent-filled weekly charts, in which parents noted the amount of time each child spent on various activities after school during a typical week, revealed that the Los Angeles and Rome children in our study spent a similar percentage of their afternoon time on homework (32% and 33% respectively). Our video observations confirmed that all the children in the study age five and older engaged in school assignments on a daily basis. The prominence of homework activities in both sites raised two questions: (1) to what extent the US and Italian parents’ engagement in their children’s schoolwork was similar, and (2) to what extent parental involvement in each site reflect similar parenting ideologies and perspectives on childhood?

Supervising homework

As soon as our Los Angeles parents reunited with their children at the end of the day they inquired about the ‘homework situation’. Wingard (2006) has suggested that this common inquiry reflected parental sense of obligation and responsibility for the accomplishment of homework. Our parents’ interviews confirmed this. Consider the LA father in excerpt 1 below who described checking his eight-year-old daughter’s schoolwork routinely.

Excerpt 1 (LA father)

When I’m making dinner, I’ll look at her folder and see the homework. If I find something that is wrong, then I’ll call her and she’ll correct it in the kitchen. For mathematics I just help her; we have some flashcards with addition and subtraction and we will do it before reading.

Using the present progressive (‘when I’m making dinner’) this father marks the habitual, ‘scripted’ nature of his supervising activity. He emphasizes his active participation in the child’s homework, as he lists the sequence of actions he engages in: looking at the folder, seeing the homework, finding the error, calling the child, who eventually corrects the homework according to the father’s instructions. In addition, using the inclusive pronoun we, the father presents himself and his daughter as partners working together on math skills.

In excerpt 2 below, a Roman mother affirms her involvement in schoolwork as she recounts what happened when she was checking her eight-year-old daughter’s math homework.

Excerpt 2 (Roman mother)

The other day, she finished her math exercises. I made her do some more, but not the same ones because these were already corrected. I double checked out how to do them, and made her do the exercises. I understood the points that she could not get. She made mistakes again, but it was good because I could see for myself and explain to her. And so she no longer made mistakes. However, this doesn’t work all the time.

Similarly to the father in excerpt 1, the Roman mother narrates in a very detailed way her supervising activity of her child’s work. She describes all the actions she engaged in, thus indexing the high level of involvement and responsibility she directs toward homework. The LA and Roman parents’ tendency to provide evidence for their attendance to their children’s educational needs reveals their views that such behavior reflects ‘good’ parenting and conveys their desire to present themselves as moral, agentive, and reflexive parents.

Despite these similarities, some differences can be detected in the discourses of the two parents. In spite of the fact that the Roman mother, like other Roman parents (Pontecorvo et al., 2013), was quite involved in her children’s homework, she expressed some skepticism regarding whether this behavior was truly useful. Questioning the value of parental involvement practices, as will be shown below, has been a repeated theme that differentiated the parents in the two corpora.

In the following excerpt, a Roman father (of 8- and 13-year-old boys) questions the premise that parents need to monitor their children’s schoolwork.

Excerpt 3 (Roman father)

Supervising is not good, because if one corrects what they do, then the teachers don’t know their teaching process [what’s going on]. Supervision, they should do themselves. We do it in such a way that they check their own work. If they make a mistake, we tell them ‘look what you have done’, and he figures it out and corrects it. But if he insists, then we tell him ‘talk to your teacher’.

This father explicitly proposes that parents’ help with homework could potentially interfere with the way teachers expect the work to be done. He places the responsibility for checking homework onto the child, and in contrast to the father in excerpt 1, suggests that teachers should be the ones to correct and aid children when they have difficulties. Hence, the father expresses a distinct separation between the duties of home and school, diminishing the value of parents’ direct intervention in the educational sphere.

Homework – enough is enough?

We observed that the Roman parents (excerpt 2) furnished children with extra exercises when they thought that they performed poorly. However, the LA parents highlighted their tendency to provide children with additional work as a means for cognitive simulation. As seen in excerpt 1, LA parents indicated that they purchased educational resources, such as games and workbooks, so that they could continue to work with the children and develop their academic skills. One mother recounted: ‘We have flashcards, we have lots of books. I mean I have every book for resources. I have the homework helper for spelling. I have the homework helper for reading. I have the homework helper for math, for history’. Another mother told us that she used such materials as extra homework to keep her 11-year-old son busy.

Excerpt 4 (LA mother)

He may have homework three to four times a week. But usually about the time he gets home he’s already done it on the bus. And the bus ride is about an hour. It’s not very much. So I have things that I give him to do. I have him read. I have workbooks he can do. Just to kind of (pause) keep stimulating him. … So um I give him things to do and it covers math, um English, creative writing, and some science.

By providing academic stimulation beyond that which is offered to him through the school, this mother demonstrates her teacher-like knowledge of subjects and levels that are appropriate for her son. This extra work is not presented as available for the boy to choose to do, but rather the mother controls and enforces the activity.

In contrast, some of the Roman parents expressed a concern about the continuous stimulation of a child’s cognitive abilities and criticized the time pressure and burden of schoolwork presented to their children.

Excerpt 5 (Roman father)

I’m not a teacher, so I don’t want to get into the discussion of the didactic value of homework. They [the teachers] will probably say that it has a value. … But having said that, in fact, it is a stressful time to manage [homework] on Saturday and Sunday. Because, I mean, Esther carries on her shoulders long days of school during the week and three swimming team practices. And so, I believe that she has the right to be idle and rest.

Asked about his eight-year-old daughter’s homework, this father indirectly questions the pedagogical value of homework, emphasizing instead its negative effect on his daughter and the family. Further, this father’s suggestion that his daughter should be allowed to do nothing stands in stark contrast to the American mother’s priority of keeping her son engaged (excerpt 4).

Responsibility for homework

Examination of the ethnographic video recordings of daily life has given us access to parents’ actual practices. We found that our parents routinely reminded, monitored, managed, and assisted with the homework task. We observed that the LA parents tended to insist, more than the Roman parents, on their children’s meeting certain work standards. In the next excerpt a mother exercises her authority in order to make sure that her six-year-old daughter not only completes her writing but also does it neatly.

Excerpt 6 (LA family)

Mother

((walks into her daughter’s room and stops by the desk where the girl is arranging some papers)) Okay, now. Listen to me. Before you do these- these words, if they are sloppy-

Daughter

(Rip all up)

Mother

No, I’m telling you. If you don’t take your time, I’m gonna rip them up. You understand me?

Daughter

Mm-hm

Mother

I want it neat. Sit down!

In this harsh exchange, the mother presents herself as having the power to judge and demand a certain quality of work and to reject the product if it does not meet her standards. Through repeatedly soliciting and directing the child’s attention to the task, this mother adopts a teacher-like evaluative eye and expectations. As a result, the home becomes an extension of school, where standards of performance are enforced.

The Roman parents’ ambivalence toward homework and school’s expectations seen in the interviews was also found when they interacted with their children. In the next excerpt a Roman mother, father, and their 11-year-old son are sitting together in front of the computer, engaged in the boy’s internet-based assignment. The sequence starts with the parents’ surprise to find out that the child has to write an essay and submit it the next day.

Excerpt 7 (Italian family)

Mother

You have to turn it in? You’re kidding.

Federico

Eh.

Father

Do it today?

Mother

Oh my god, we’ll never finish it.

Mother

You really have to turn it in?

Federico

What do you expect?

Mother

You never had to do that before.

Federico

Sure I did.

Mother

Uhhh ((sighing))

Mother

So you need to turn it in?

Federico

((nods))

Mother

She never asked you to turn it in before.

In repeatedly inquiring about the new situation, the mother seems to treat with skepticism the reasonableness of the task given to the child. Ultimately, it is the teacher’s request that is questioned, rather than Federico’s failure to attend to the assignment earlier.

The perception that teachers and schools are directly responsible for causing stress in the home was mentioned by another Italian mother, who noted that her compliance with teachers’ request to help with homework ‘resulted in big conflicts … . Every time I get involved it always ends up terribly. So we definitively prefer that he works by himself, even if he might do it more superficially.’ Lack of adherence to the school’s request was never articulated in LA parents’ interviews.

Homework as a source of tension

Homework activities have been shown to be a cause for tension in the home (Forsberg, 2009; Solomon et al., 2002; Wingard, 2006). Our ethnographic observations revealed that in both sites parents were frustrated with their children’s performance, their inability to do a thorough job, and get their work done in a timely manner. Consider, for example, the exchange below in which an Italian father grows irritated with his 13-year-old son, Leo, as they work together on revising a history lesson.

Excerpt 8 (Italian family)

Leo

And then the chapter is done ((suggesting that they’ve finished covering the materials))

Father

Ok, I got it, but you need to tell me more, right? ((challenging tone))

Leo

Yeah ((resigned tone))

(…)

Father

So, here is the Austro-Prussian war in the north ((pointing on the map in the book)) and the third independence war in Italy occurred in order to conquer (pause) what region?

Leo

Veneto.

Father

Eh. But if you know it, why are you so stuck? (pause) Damn it!

The father is critical of Leo because he perceives him to be unmotivated, maintaining only a superficial level of engagement in the revising activity. When Leo comes up with the correct answer, rather than praise him, the father reproaches him for being reluctant to come up with it earlier (‘why are you so stuck?’).

Observations in the Los Angeles households revealed an additional type of conflict between parents and children that was driven, we propose, by parents feeling accountable for their children’s work vis-a-vis the school. In the following excerpt, an LA mother has let her eight-year-old son, Jonah, postpone his homework all afternoon. When she summons Jonah to begin his work, Jonah is in the middle of watching a DVD on the computer. After a few exchanges during which Jonah ignores his mother, she reaches to the computer and turns the movie off. The conflict escalates.

Excerpt 9 (LA family)

Mother

Go do your homework! ((Raised voice))

Jonah

((Whining)) I have to get it to the part ((referring to queuing the DVD to the point where he stopped watching)). You wasted time. This is your fault that I have to do this! ((Shouting))

Mother

If you continue to talk to me this way I’m going to take- you’re not going to be watching this vi- this video at all. I’m going to count to three and you’re going to go do your homework. (Pause) One.

Jonah

((Whining loudly)) I have to get it to the part and then pause it!

Mother

No, you do that after you do your homework! ((Raised voice))

After two more minutes of arguing the mother holds Jonah tightly by the arm and tries to pull him away from the computer. Jonah resists, trying to free himself from his mother’s grip and move toward the computer. At this point, the mother angrily says:

Mother

Well, you know what, I’ll just talk to your teacher tomorrow about why you didn’t do your homework, but you will not be watching this video.

This excerpt exposes the verbal and even physical conflict that sometimes occurs when parents and children clash over homework. This mother’s sense of obligation to ‘make’ her child do his homework is not diminished even when the ‘scene’ is being observed and filmed by researchers. The mother’s threat that she’ll talk to the teacher is used both as a shaming device to persuade Jonah to comply, but also as a means for passing the control over homework onto the teacher. We suggest that invoking the school as an ally of the mother’s efforts to get Jonah to do his homework indexes the reciprocal relationships between home and school, which is also evidenced by the school’s recruitment of parental help in the classroom, discussed in the next section.

Beyond homework

Elementary schools in the US often expect parents to volunteer in the classrooms (Machen et al., 2005). In addition to helping the teachers, this type of involvement offers parents some benefits, as the LA mother explains below.

Excerpt 10 (LA mother)

Since I volunteer Fridays, I get to know the teachers very well. And so every year I actually file a request for a teacher. … And I- since I grade papers, or work with the kids [in the classroom] one-on-one sometimes, I kind of gauge where they are [her children] in the class … and [that they are] not lagging behind.

By volunteering in the school, this mother can select her children’s teacher and gauge their performance against the rest of the class.

Parental involvement in Rome did not cross the school threshold, parents were not expected to help teachers, let alone come into the classroom. This is evidenced in the surprise with which the Italian mother below responded to the question about participating in school activities.

Excerpt 11 (Italian mother)

Researcher

In what school activities do you participate, if any?

Mother

Extra, you mean?

Researcher

Any kind.

Mother

Us? The parents?

Researcher

Yes.

Mother

No, nothing. Especially in elementary school they keep you out of the way.

This mother’s requests for clarification highlight the unexpected nature of the question and depict the idea of participation in school activities as a non-standard practice. The formulation ‘they keep you out of the way’ suggests that the collaboration between family and school is uncommon (Iannaccone and Marsico, 2007).

Cultivating the child’s academic success

The analysis of the interviews reveals marked differences regarding the extent to which LA and Roman parents emphasized or de-emphasized the relevance of their efforts in directing their children’s academic success and molding their competences. Consistent with Lareau’s (2003) ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting orientation, many of our LA parents laid out strategies to enhance their children’s academic success. Below, an LA mother explains the motivation behind the decision to have her 13-year-old son take Japanese as his foreign language:

Excerpt 12 (LA mother)

It’s a tough language. Uh, we’re taking it for the sole purpose of making him stand out as a Caucasian-Jewish boy with good grades. We- We’ve heard that cultural di- cultural diversity is king.

The selection of a foreign language is presented as part of a careful plan to make the boy stand out in his competition for a slot in a good college. This long-term plan (college is five years away) reveals the mother’s preoccupation with the future and her efforts to influence the direction it can take.

This mother was not alone in her attempt to shape her child’s education and skills in order to strengthen his chances for top universities. One LA father mentioned, admitting that ‘it is kind of sick’, that he had sent his very academic son to a college prep SAT course when he was in fifth grade. A number of families explained that they moved to live in certain neighborhoods so that their children could attend schools with high national test scores. One of these families mentioned that they planned to move again in two years so that their kids would become eligible to attend a local nationally recognized middle school.

The perception that it is a parental duty to invest effort and money in the cultivation of the child through various educational activities in order to facilitate the best possible (college) future is well captured at the end of the interview with same LA mother from excerpt 12:

Excerpt 13 (LA mother)

And I have all these big ideas about what my job is as the mother. I think that my job is to give them all that they need to be able to have the most choices [of colleges]. … We keep trying to give them an education not only through school. … That’s why I went back to work, so that we can afford Japanese tutors and trips to Europe, so that we can afford all the extra things to add to the richness of their childhood.

The Roman parents appeared to lessen the value of their efforts to push their child toward high achievement. Responding to whether her children (8 and 11 years old) were doing well at school, the mother below reported:

Excerpt 14 (Italian mother)

At school? Average, average … I think that they are average because, good or bad, they get enough stuff and they are smart enough. Eventually, they will do fine.

Although not enthusiastic about her children’s performance, this mother seems to accept this condition as the present reality. Implicit in her comments on the present is the view that her children’s future is not fully determined by current efforts (‘Eventually, they will do fine’). This stands in striking contrast to the American mother in excerpt 12, who emphasized the future-driven, strategic selection of a demanding language for her son to master. Whereas the Italian mother describes her children as average, the American mother is striving to make her son appear extraordinary.

In summary, while both LA and Roman parents displayed involvement in their children’s schoolwork, differences could be observed in the ways in which parents in the two contexts emphasized, or conversely, diminished, the strategic, purposeful quality of their involvement. The LA parents put greater emphasis on children’s performance, acting like surrogate teachers, reflecting school expectations. They also displayed greater involvement in making their children’s acquisition of knowledge effective and marketable for their future. The Rome parents, in contrast, expressed some ambivalence toward homework and sometimes criticized teachers for the work they assigned. Further, they often expressed skepticism about strategic planning for the future.

Discussion

Since the 1990s the number of American high school graduates attending college has increased, while slots in high-ranking colleges have not risen accordingly, creating fierce competition among prospective students (Bound and Turner, 2007; Ramey and Ramey, 2010). Ramey and Ramey (2010) have proposed that the rivalry for scarce slots in top colleges has resulted in a significant rise of educated parents’ involvement in children’s education and extra-curricular activities, driving up both parental standards for involvement and college admission requirements.

This argument offers a compelling explanation for American parental involvement becoming increasingly strategic and extending beyond education to activities (e.g. sports, community service) valuable for a college applicant’s profile (Kremer-Sadlik and Gutierrez, 2013; Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2010). Underlying these parental efforts and strategies, we propose, is the sense that there is a direct and unequivocal relationship between children’s performance (mostly at school, but also in other areas) and their future trajectory into higher education and beyond. Thus, parental involvement in their children’s lives and attention to their performance were driven by a sense of urgency that what happened in the present, whether a child did homework neatly, or took Japanese as a foreign language, influenced that child’s chance at a successful life.

The character and motivation of Italian parents’ involvement, we suggest, is rooted in a fundamentally different approach to higher education in Italy. For a start, the Italian educational system has put as its priority the education of the masses. Late 1980s university reform further increased the likelihood of mass attendance by opening new campuses in remote regions (Bratti et al., 2008). More importantly, Italian tertiary schools are not nationally ranked making it so that entering any university and getting a bachelor’s degree is guaranteed for high school graduates (Bertola and Checchi, 2002). The preference for affordable, open access, non-competitive higher education may explain Italian parents’ lack of urgency when it comes to their children’s academic performance.

However, we suggest that there is a more critical aspect to Italian education that shapes parents’ involvement attitudes and practices: Italian studies reveal a rather weak link between educational attainment and future careers (Barone et al., 2011). Research has criticized Italy for a substantial lack of mobility with education, showing that one’s social origins and family status play a greater role in accessing the job market and other services than one’s individual skills and education (Cappellari, 2004; Checchi, 2003; Sylos Labini, 2008). We submit that weaker relationships between children’s education and future success are reflected in the Roman parents’ skepticism toward the value of their involvement in homework activities, their criticism of teachers, and their lack of strategic planning of their children’s education.

Differing views of childhood and childrearing

We propose that our US and Italian parents’ differing approaches to being involved in their children’s education, their divergent attitudes toward their children’s performance at school, and the meaning it carries into the future may reflect distinct ideologies of childhood. Halldén (1991) has identified in parental interviews two views of child development, the child as a ‘being’, referring to child development as a natural process driven by inner forces, and the child as a ‘project’, in which child development is dependent on parents’ active modeling and directing.

We suggest that the LA parents in our study reflect a view of the child that corresponds to Halldén’s child as a project and of childhood as period of preparation (Mintz, 2004). In this perspective parents are agentive; they exercise ‘concerted cultivation’ parenting (Lareau, 2003). They provide opportunities to maximize children’s development through specific strategies, and they monitor and evaluate performance to assess children’s ‘preparedness’.

Our Roman parents, while displaying involvement, did not present themselves as exercising control and strategically planning their child’s developmental steps. This does not mean that they did not grapple with questions and doubts about how to better raise their children. On the contrary, uncertainties were exhibited and possibly even exacerbated by the reflexive nature afforded by interviews (Fatigante and Fiata, 2011; Kremer-Sadlik, 2009). Still, Roman parents downplayed their agentive role in coaching and preparing the child for the future. They prioritize childhood as a period of freedom, in which parents leave room for children’s autonomy, rather than direct their path. The Italian mother’s evaluation that her children ‘will be fine’, expresses a degree of confidence that what the future holds for her children is not linked directly to the present.

Conclusion

By combining analyses of ethnographic observations with parental interviews, this study shows that, while our US and Italian parents engaged in similar practices such as monitoring and checking a child’s homework, their involvement in their children’s education was experienced differently and motivated by different assumptions. We have shown that their daily routines reflect and reproduce distinct cultural preferences and expectations within the local education systems. Examination of these contextual realities offers a more comprehensive and situated interpretation of Italian and US parents’ choices and actions. Specifically, we have proposed that the perceived relationships between compulsory and higher education defines the nature of parental involvement in school work and their active and strategic planning of their children’s future trajectory.

Finally, with the recent implementation in Italy of national tests for students in elementary and middle school, with the increase of private funding of schools, and with upcoming reforms aimed at rewarding students’ performance and teaching excellence, one might wonder whether Italian parents’ attitude toward education will also change, resulting in a greater emphasis on individual effort and strategic planning for children’s higher education in order to better prepare them for success in a competitive world.

Footnotes

Funding

The research on which this study is based was funded by the Sloan Foundation.

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