Gift and Sacrifice: Parental Involvement in Latino Adolescents’ Education Rosario Ceballo, Laura K. Maurizi, Gloria A. Suarez, and Maria T. Aretakis University of Michigan Although myriad studies document the benefits of parental involvement in education on various indicators of children’s academic performance, less research examines parental involvement among adolescents in low-income Latino families. Incorporating a multidimensional conceptualization of parental involvement, this study examined the relation between parental involvement and academic outcomes in a sample of 223 low-income, Latino adolescents. Results indicated that three types of parental involvement (gift/sacrifice, future discussions/academic socialization, and school involvement) had significant, positive associations with academic outcomes. Moreover, our results suggest that parents’ stories about struggles with poverty and immigration are an important component of parental involvement, contributing to adolescents’ desire to succeed academically and “give back” to parents. Additionally, our findings indicated that the positive relations between parental involvement and academic outcomes were stronger for immigrant youth and for those with higher endorsements of the Latino cultural value of respeto (respect). Keywords: adolescence, education, immigrant, Latino, parental involvement Countless indicators of academic performance reveal that Latino youth are among the least educated children in the United States. According to data from the National Center for Education Statis- tics (2007) and the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2007), Latino youth have lower achievement test scores, higher drop out rates, and lower college attendance compared with European American and African American youth. Certainly, a large part of the educational underperformance of Latino youth can be attributed to poverty, as well as enrollment in lower quality schools, English language difficulties, and institutional practices of discrimination (Ceballo, Huerta, & Epstein-Ngo, 2010; Eamon, 2005; Suárez-Orozco, Rho- des, & Milburn, 2009). The Latino population in the United States is disproportionately young and poor and thereby is susceptible to the many adverse effects of economic hardship (Eamon, 2005). This article focuses on the educational values and effort of a predominantly Dominican American sample of Latino adolescents. Latinos who trace their ethnic origins to the Dominican Republic comprise 20% of the Latino population in the Northeastern United States, with 45% of Dominican children under 18 living below the poverty line compared with 9% of non-Latino White children (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2007). For several decades, researchers, educators, community advo- cates, and policymakers have extolled the benefits of parental educational involvement for all children. Across all grade levels, a wealth of studies specifically link parental involvement in educa- tion with higher grade point averages, achievement in reading and mathematics, academic motivation, and school engagement, even while controlling for prior academic achievement (Alfaro, Umaña- Taylor, & Bamaca, 2006; Ceballo et al., 2010; Cooper & Crosnoe, 2007; Crosnoe, 2001; Fan, Williams, & Wolters, 2012; Henry, Cavanagh, & Oetting, 2011; Hill et al., 2004; Hill & Tyson, 2009; Seginer, 2006). Yet, parental involvement in education tends to decline into the middle and high school years (Crosnoe, 2001; Hill & Tyson, 2009) and shifts from activities such as providing assis- tance in classrooms and helping with homework to attending school events and providing encouragement for academics (Seginer, 2006). Perhaps this is in response to adolescents’ grow- ing needs for autonomy or because parents feel less equipped to assist with more complex school material. Even so, this decline in parental involvement highlights the need to better understand the nature of parental involvement that does continue into adoles- cence. In Grolnick and Slowiaczek’s (1994) framework, parental in- volvement is defined as the resources parents dedicate to their children’s education. Put simply, parental involvement encom- passes, “parents’ interactions with schools and with their children to promote academic success” (Hill & Tyson, 2009, p. 741). To date, the preponderance of research on parental involvement has been conducted with middle- to upper-income, European Ameri- can parents of elementary school-age children. A paucity of re- search focuses on families with high school students, racial/ethnic minority youth, or youth who are scholastically underachieving (Fan et al., 2012). By extension, little research examines parental involvement among Latino families; moreover, the research con- This article was published Online First July 8, 2013. Rosario Ceballo, Laura K. Maurizi, Gloria A. Suarez, and Maria T. Aretakis, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Funding for this study was provided to Rosario Ceballo by the National Center for Institutional Diversity and the Office of the Vice President for Research in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the Univer- sity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. We are grateful to the school administrators and teachers as well as to the students whose willingness to share their experiences made this study possible. We are also appreciative of our research team’s enormous dedication. Finally, we thank Tabbye Chavous for her thoughtful and generous feedback on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rosario Ceballo, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: rosarioc@umich.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology © 2013 American Psychological Association 2014, Vol. 20, No. 1, 116 –127 1099-9809/14/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0033472 116