Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research Vol. 53, No. 3, June 2009, 277–293 ISSN 0031-3831 print/ISSN 1470-1170 online © 2009 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research DOI: 10.1080/00313830902917352 http://www.informaworld.com Parents’ Participation in Their Child’s Schooling Hannu Räty, Kati Kasanen, and Noora Laine University of Joensuu Taylor and Francis Ltd CSJE_A_391907.sgm 10.1080/00313830902917352 Scandinavian Journal of Education Research 0031-3831 (print)/1470-1170 (online) Original Article 2009 Scandinavian Journal of Education Research 53 3 0000002009 HannuRäty hannu.raty@joensuu.fi The present study set out to survey Finnish parents’ participation in their child’s schooling and related experiences. The subjects were a nationally representative group of academically and vocationally educated fathers and mothers (N = 391) who had a child on the fifth grade. A great majority of the parents reported that they attended the parent evenings and saw them in a positive light. Most parents helped their child in her/ his schoolwork, though some of them were doubtful of their own competence for it. The choice of schools, which was considered mainly by urban parents and academically educated parents, seemed to introduce a new private element into parental participation without changing the existing communal forms of participation. Keywords: parent participation, parent’s gender and education, choice of school As was proclaimed by Mr Tarjanne, a Finnish pedagogue, at the beginning of the twen- tieth century, “the home and the school are social educational factors, which we would so like to see cooperating to produce a new generation, better than ours. But in practice the home and the school have mostly remained more distant from each other, more uninterested in each other’s ways and methods than a consistent and wholesome education of our youth would permit” (Reima, 1933, p. 117). Whilst the forms of parental participation have varied historically, parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling has always been considered to play an important role in children’s academic performance (e.g. Epstein, 1995). The present study set out to survey in what ways Finnish parents participate in their childrens schooling, how they experience this participation, and in what ways the participation is dependent on the parent’s education and gender. As can be inferred from Mr Tarjanne’s words, cooperation between the compulsory school and the home has proved to be difficult to attain from the beginning. This is a complex issue of division of responsibility for education. Symptomatically, Reima (1933) cites a teacher’s comment from the early twentieth century regarding the possibilities of cooperation between the home and the school: “Talk to the homes, that’s where the main culprits are, and that’s whose educational efforts are a thousand times more important than the school’s.” The tense relationship between the school and the home is reflected, among other things, in the argument that parents and teachers are each other’s “natural enemies” (Waller, 1976). In practice, it has been mainly the school that has defined the agenda of Hannu Räty, Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu; Kati Kasanen, Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu; Noora Laine, Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hannu Räty, Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu, PO Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland. E-mail: hannu.raty@joensuu.fi and kati.kasanen@joensuu.fi