SHANLAX International Journal of Education http://www.shanlaxjournals.com 92 How can we make Students Happier at School? Parental Pressure or Support for Academic Success, Educational Stress and School Happiness of Secondary School Students Çetin Toraman Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5319-0731 Osman Aktan Duzce University, Turkey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6583-3765 Gunes Korkmaz Turkey http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9060-5972 Abstract The ongoing debate about if students’ lives are either positively or negatively affected by parental involvement in terms of support or pressure for their children academic success is still important. This study aims to determine the relationships between secondary school students’ gender, parents’ income, grade, parental pressure or support for students’ academic success, educational stress they experience, and their level of school happiness, and to examine the effect of parental pressure or support for academic success on the level of school happiness. The study was carried out with 1051 secondary school students in Düzce, Turkey. To collect data, three separate scales were used, and the data were analyzed using path analysis. The results revealed that happiness at school decreases as hopelessness versus expectation, workload, work pressure increase. On the other hand, happiness at school increases when the parental support for academic success increases. Female students are happier at school than male students. Educational stress leads the parents to put more pressure on their children for their academic success, which makes the school happiness lower. Although the parents support their children for their academic success, the level of happiness at school may decrease if they are under stress. Work pressure sustains the positive effect of parental support for academic success and has a positive impact on school happiness. Keywords: Parental Pressure, Parental Support, Educational Stress, Academic Success, School Happiness Introdution School life is almost the longest phase during which people must deal with academic and social issues at the same time, and since education is a system that has many internal and external stakeholders which have either direct or indirect impact on students’ lives, considering the interaction between students and these stakeholders, one may conclude that the parents, teachers and curriculum are the ones which play a key role on the students. However, how much and in what ways the students are affected through the interaction with these stakeholders varies according to the level of education (pre-school, primary, secondary, high school, university and post-graduate education) at which the students study. Many studies have focused on the role of parents in the development and education of children (Đurišić & Bunijevac, 2017) and suggest the idea that parental involvement has a strong impact on the academic success of their children (Bradley, Ferguson & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2021; Chohan & OPEN ACCESS Manuscript ID: EDU-2022-10024546 Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Month: March Year: 2022 P-ISSN: 2320-2653 E-ISSN: 2582-1334 Received: 16.12.2021 Accepted: 12.02.2022 Published: 01.03.2022 Citation: Toraman, Çetin, et al. “How Can We Make Students Happier at School? Parental Pressure or Support for Academic Success, Educational Stress and School Happiness of Secondary School Students.” Shanlax International Journal of Education, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, pp. 92–100. DOI: https://doi.org/10.34293/ education.v10i2.4546 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License