The name is absent

Characteristics of the family

of parenting. Support for this conclusion comes from both UK and US evidence. For
example, Feinstein and Symons’ (1999) investigation of parental interest in their
children’s education in the 1958 birth cohort found that both mothers’ and fathers’
interest had large effects on progress in secondary school, conditioning on individual,
family, neighbourhood and school factors.

Ma (2001) investigated the effects of expectation and influence of students, peers,
teachers and parents on participation in advanced maths. The effect of parents’
expectations and plans for college were strong in predicting participation and that in
their presence the effect of students’ own future expectations declined. Interestingly,
peer influence and teacher expectation did not have strong effects and the effects of
student future expectation were independent of peer and teacher effects. Moreover,
when controlling for students’ prior maths achievement and attitudes toward maths,
the effects of parents’ expectations and plans for the future still held. (See also Fan,
2001; Singh et al., 1995).

Other research suggests that parental beliefs influence not only academic outcomes
but also those in other areas of children’s development. Jodl et al. (2001) investigate
the pathways linking parental values, beliefs and behaviours to adolescents’
occupational aspirations. The authors highlight the potential role of parents as
socialisers of values related to achievement and adolescents’ occupational visions of
themselves in the future. Using an ethnically diverse sample of early adolescents
growing up in non-divorced families, the authors demonstrate that parents’ valuation
of the importance of success in academic subjects predicted youths’ valuations
directly rather than indirectly through parenting behaviours. In turn these valuations
predict occupational aspirations. In these processes, parents’ views impact on children
not just because they lead parents to behave differently but because in some sense
parents’ views matter in themselves to children.

4.2.3 The relationships between parent and child cognitions

Extensive work by Eccles et al. also strongly suggests that parents’ estimates of their
children’s academic abilities are important predictors of children’s beliefs about their
own ability and sense of self-efficacy. For example, path analysis using data from the
longitudinal Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions (MSALT) showed that
parents’ views of their children’s ability in both maths and English had important
predictive relations to the children’s own self-perceptions conditioning on actual
ability (Eccles et al., 1989).

The authors attempted to test the causal direction implied in this relationship using
longitudinal cross-lagged panel analyses in structural equation models. Mothers’
perceptions of child ability at wave 1 were related to their perceptions of maths ability
at wave 2 (0.78). Similarly, the child’s perception of own maths ability at wave 1
were also linked to their own perceptions at wave 2 (0.61). Importantly, conditioning
on the child’s own ability at wave 1, mothers’ perceptions at wave 1 were related to
the child’s perceptions of his/her maths ability at wave 2 (0.22).

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