Focus on Education: Family Involvement is the Key to Student Achievement By: Anthony Pellegrino

When we parents are unhappy with our child’s school performance, we become desperate to find a solution. Should we send the child to a private school? No, let’s pass a voucher law. How about starting a charter school? Let’s reduce the number of students in the classroom. The PSS is not teaching them correctly. How about more money for technology or better teachers? Yet we miss the most obvious solution to most students’ low achievement: active family involvement.

Numerous studies and observations repeatedly prove that active parental involvement in a child’s school work is all that is needed to stimulate the low achiever. Everyone of us whether we are adults or children constantly seek the approval of each other. The young child yells out: ” Mommy, look at me! Look at me” as he does something. At work we as adults seek our boss’s approval and many times when we don’t get it we quit our job.

Families and relatives can help children both at home and at school. When everyone becomes involved in their children’s education in positive ways, children achieve higher grades and test scores, have better attendance at school, complete more homework, demonstrate more positive attitudes and behavior, graduate at higher rates, and have a greater enrollment in higher education. And it doesn’t cost one penny. It’s called “tender love and care.”

Most parents are involved while the child is in the lower grades, but as the child moves to higher grades the involvement grows less. However it is in the higher grades that the child needs our support more than ever. It is during the teen years that he is more independent in his life style and in his thinking. Without proper guidance and strong counseling that only his family can give, he becomes lost and confused resulting in decisions that perplex and oftentimes disappoint us.

What families do to help their children learn is more important to their academic process than how well-off the family is. Talking frankly to our teenagers about sex, drugs and alcohol is one way to direct their lives. Values instilled by parents–honesty, belief in the work ethic, responsibility for one’s actions, and religious principles–are twice as important for school achievement as family economic or educational backgrounds. I keep repeating: families are still the most important influence in children’s lives.

The lame excuse given by most of us parents is that we are busy running our own lives and don’t have the time for our children. Juvenile detention homes and prisons are full of children and adults who were neglected by parents who were too busy to spend time and interest in their children. Saying sorry doesn’t change the results.

No one ever said that being a parent is an easy job. Being a father or a mother is easy. But being a dad or a mom is a difficult job. I believe that when a child gets an “A” in school, the parent has also earned the “A”. Accept the fact that your children are a vital and integral part of your family and of your life. You must create time for them or you and they will fail. Prisons and welfare lines are full of such failures.

The next time you are dissatisfied with your child’s school progress and are ready to bad mouth the school, ask yourself: “How much time and effort did I spend in helping my child?” The school cannot do the job by itself. It needs your active parental involvement. STRONG FAMILIES–STRONG SCHOOLS.