Parental involvement and Chinese children's learning engagement: Promotion and arousal

Abstract

This study used three-wave data to construct random intercept cross-lagged model to test the bidirectional relationship between parental involvement and learning engagement among Chinese primary school children and the different effects of paternal/maternal involvement. A total of 1037 Chinese primary school students participated in the survey over three-time points (six months apart for each data collection). Results indicated that at the between-person level, children's learning engagement was positively related to both paternal and maternal involvement. At the within-person level, paternal involvement can positively predict children's learning and vice versa; maternal involvement has no significant predictive effect on children's learning engagement nor it was influence by children's learning. The results showed that different parental involvement has different effects on children's learning at the within-person level, revealed that fathers play a more important role in contributing to children's learning.