How Parents Can Help Students Succeed in School--Four Interventions

Many years ago, as a student teacher in an urban high school, I asked a parent for help in teaching an unengaged and out of control teenager. The parent responded that it was my job and not her's to teach the child. While that unhelpful suggestion may be technically true, parents can do much more to ensure their child's success.

Outlining the major concepts of his book, Our Schools and Our Future, Chester Finn wrote in 1991:

“…we need to integrate parents far more directly and intimately into the work of formal education. This is commonly assumed to be the toughest nut of all to crack, and it may well be. Nor am I referring only to what happens in school. Parents are the single most important influence in the 91 percent of children's lives spent outside school. They aren't the only influence on what happens during that time, of course, but they are much the strongest. Engaging parents in choosing the school is part of the solution. Parent participation in education governance is another. Explicit parent education programs are another….Parent-teacher-student contracts may be yet another. Much more imaginative use can also be made of technology to assist the school to reach the home and vice versa."

So close to twenty years later, have we used the most potent force in education—parents? We have not. Parents do not participate enough in supporting education. I am a father of five as well as a high school teacher. I have seen what parents can do from both sides of the fence. Here are four interventions that are comparably easy to implement.

1. Turn off the television
Television reduces school performance. The tube takes time away from educational activities, and it doesn’t matter what programs are watched. Television also serves as a narcoleptic and makes kids fat. The research linking television watching to increased mortality rates is also quite scary. And this just out on Depression should make you want to throw the television out the window. I do not have a television in my house.

2. Limit cell phone usage.
Turn off your kids’ cell phones at the dinner table and make your home a sanctuary from social media. If you don't think that intervention alone will make a positive difference in your family's life, read Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation linked here. See also Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically from Five Years Ago here.

3. Read.
If parents enjoy books and reading it increases the chances that the kids will too. Kids need background knowledge to succeed in school and reading provides it. I became a good student simply by imitating my father who read his history books on weekends. Active learning, through books, is usually superior to the passive learning of video. We must use our imagination when reading, even somewhat with picture books. A study entitled, Scholarly Culture and Education Success, "based on twenty years' worth of data, found that 'children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents' education, occupation, and class'" (Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011, P.127)

4. Talk about political issues and school assignments at the dinner table.
My August 16, 2010 post described how dinnertime debates opened up a world of ideas for me. My brother is an award-winning concierge and my sister is a university professor. These dinnertime discussions exposed us to the issues of the day.

Andreas Schleicher, the head of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), said that his organization interviewed three to five thousand parents of fifteen-year-olds his organization tested in sixteen different countries.

There was a clear connection between parental involvement in their children's education and their PISA scores. Those young people whose parents were involved with their education--doing as little as asking them everyday "How was school?" or "What did you do in school today?"--or read books to them clearly performed better on the PISA test than those whose parents were not involved. (Friedman and Mandelbaum, P.126)

Parents can lay the ground work for their children's academic success.

I've Got One--How About You? Looking at Personality

Gordon Allport

  A long time ago, when I was a psychology grad student, mainstream research in personality theory was based on Gordon Allport's studies on traits, the enduring dispositions we use in everyday life to describe people. Later researchers reduced thousands of descriptors to five large domains, nicknamed the "Big Five". University of California psychiatrist Samuel Barondes in Making Sense of People: Decoding the Mysteries of Personality (FT Press, 2012) shows how to use the Five Factor Model of Personality, ie., the Big Five in thoroughly describing a person's essence.

People can demonstrate high to low levels of each of the Big Five domains. Having high or low scores in itself does not make you more or less psychologically fit.

• Extraversion: gregariousness, love of attention and excitement, assertiveness, and expression of positive emotions. Barondes uses Bill Clinton as an example of an American president high in extraversion and Barack Obama as a president low in it.
• Agreeableness: wanting to help one's group, cooperativeness, warmth, kindness. My first grade teacher was high in agreeableness. She was a well-loved by all her students, and I would do anything to win her smile. Many successful business executives, on the other hand, are low in agreeableness.
• Conscientiousness: reliable, trustworthy, organized, punctual. My father would make a dinner reservation a month in advance, confirm a day before, and show up within two minutes of the set time. Always. Jazz musicians, especially the amateurs, are low in conscientiousness and notorious for forgetting about the gig, leaving important instruments behind, drinking, and showing up improperly dressed.
• Neuroticism: feels and displays negative emotions, dysthymic, anxious, insecure. Barondes reminds us that Sigmund Freud was spurred on to success partly because of his struggles with insecurity and anxiety. But who wants to be around someone that spouts negativity all the time?
• Openness: imaginative, curious, artistic, creative. Some people enjoy the consistency of doing the same thing, day after day. Others are more daring, crave novelty, and are willing to put up with the frustrations and exhaustion connected with creative work.

Find out where you stand on the Big Five by taking a computer test created by Dr. John A. Johnson, Professor of Psychology, Penn State University. The link is here. Take the longer (300-item) version here.

(Full disclosure: I took the short test and was scored as average in everything except conscientiousness, where I was rated high. This may not be so bad. University of California, Riverside professor Howard Friedman analyzed the longitudinal data of Lewis Terman's gifted children, and found that high conscientiousness was correlated with longevity. See the meta analysis abstract here.)

There are a lot of combinations of the Big Five. If I simplify scores and assess people as either high, medium, or low in each Big Five domain, I have fifteen possible combinations and the math operation 15! equals about 307 billion possibilities. Most combinations of the Big Five are a good fit to our society, adding to a glorious rainbow of human personality. However, Barondes calls some troublesome characteristics the "Top Ten." These personality disorders can also be described through scoring on the Big Five. For example, a schizoid (extremely detached and unemotional) personality can be described as very low extraversion and a schizotypal (discomfort in relationships and eccentric behavior) can be described as low extraversion, low agreeableness, high neuroticism and high openness.

In summary, Barondes describes his techniques for examining personality:

1. Remember our common humanity and the way personalities develop.
2. Make a Big Five profile and notice what stands out.
3. Look for potentially troublesome patterns.
4. Make a moral assessment using universal and cultural standards.
5. Listen to the person's story and relate it to what you observe.
6. Integrate what you've found (P. 147).

Famous social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and fellow Stanford professor John Boyd examine personality from a philosophical perspective in The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time that will Change Your Life (Free Press, 2008). Rather than describing personality by traits, Zimbardo and Boyd look at a person's time perspective, whether she is past, present, or future-oriented in describing why people behave the way they do. Zimbardo has created two inventories, The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) (downloadable here)and the Transcendental-future Time Perspective Inventory (TFTPI) that measure

six time perspectives: two past, two present, and two future. These time perspectives are called the:

• Past-negative
• Past-positive
• present-fatalistic
• Present-hedonistic
• Future
• Transcendental-future (P.52)

People tend to be oriented towards either the past, present or future. Attitudes toward the past may be either positive or negative. Those captivated by the present may be hedonistic or fatalistic, and those planning for the future, the high-achievers among us, may never enjoy life in the here and now. Lastly, those scoring high in transcendental-future look forward to the rewards of the afterlife.
(Full disclosure: I scored high in past-positive and future.)

Studies show that the Big Five domains tend to remain stable over adulthood. Zimbardo, however, shows how one can change his ZTPI score, loosening up and enjoying being in the moment if one is too future-oriented or planning more if one is too much of a present-hedonist.

The book ends quite poetically:

Your time matters to you and, in the end, is all that matters. Time is all that you have. You might as well spend it seeking happiness and purpose--whatever they mean to you (P. 319).