Parental school involvement in relation to children's grades and adaptation to school Edwin T. Tan, Wendy A. Goldberg ⁎ Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA article info abstract Available online 20 March 2009 From an ecological perspective, it is important to examine linkages among key settings in the child's life. The current study focuses on parents' involvement in children's education both at school and at home. Ninety-one families with school-aged children (91 fathers and 91 mothers) participated in a survey study assessing the levels of parental involvement (direct at school site, homework, extracurricular educational activities, and interpersonal involvement) and their relationship to children's grades and to parental reports of children's anxiety about, and enjoyment of, school. Analyses demonstrated the unique contributions made by fathers and by mothers to the explained variance in children's grades and adaptation to school. Mothers' and fathers' school involvement had differential associations with sons' and daughters' school- related outcomes. Support was found for both the transactional and interactional models of parent-child socialization. Associations between levels of parental school involvement and child outcomes were not always positively signed. Findings highlight the complexity of parental school involvement and hold implications for families and schools as they attempt to facilitate the types of involvement that are high leverage points for children's academic development. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Parental involvement Fathers Academic achievement Anxiety School enjoyment 1. Introduction Children's success or failure in school does not occur within a vacuum, but rather is situated within nested environments. Bronfenbrenner (1979) is credited with calling our attention to the larger contexts of children's lives. He emphasized the need to look beyond the individual child to examine the settings (microsystems) such as home and school in which children are directly involved, and he challenged researchers to study the linkages (mesosystem) between the key settings in which children are situated. In Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, the larger social settings that do not involve the child directly, but that affect the child's life, such as the parents' workplace, comprise the layer of the exosystem. Cultural values and customs constitute the outermost layer (macrosystem) and exert influence on the interactions among the other layers. The current study focuses on linkages between home and school and reflects the cultural change of greater father involvement in their children's lives. At a macrosystem level, cultural norms regarding the roles of mothers and fathers have been shifting over the last few decades. Two of the largest cultural shifts, which are not unrelated, have been in the proportion of mothers with minor children in the workforce and the greater involvement of fathers in the care and supervision of their children (Coltrane, 1996; Crosby, 1991; Greenberger, Goldberg, Hamill, O'Neil, & Payne, 1989; Greenberger & Goldberg,1989; Hochschild, 1989; Marsiglio, Amato, Day & Lamb, 2000). The extent of this social change was the call for increased support and involvement from fathers issued early at the national level in the new millennium. In a written statement, the President affirmed the importance of fathers in the lives of children and asserted the need to make committed fatherhood a national priority (Executive Office of the President, 2001 . Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 30 (2009) 442–453 ⁎ Corresponding author. Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA. Tel.: +1949 824 5219; fax: +1 949 824 3002. E-mail addresses: edwint@uci.edu (E.T. Tan), wendy.goldberg@uci.edu (W.A. Goldberg). 0193-3973/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2008.12.023 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology