The Barriers to Parental Involvement—
And What Can be Done: A Research Analysis

John H. Wherry, Ed.D., President
The Parent Institute

For the last 16 years, since The Parent Institute was founded in 1989, I have looked for and tried to read every bit of research about parent involvement that I can find. Like most other topics in education, there is a lot of literature on parent involvement, but rigorous scientific research is scarce. It's just a lot harder to do objective, quantifiable and reliable research on human behavior such as parent involvement than it is to conduct research on, say, the electrical conductivity of various metal alloys. (And physicists would tell us even that's not as simple as it sounds.)

But just because parent involvement is hard to do doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Virtually every study from the very informal to the highly sophisticated confirms that parent involvement is critically important in the education of children of all ages, from newborns through high school age and beyond. We know that parents—and what they do or don't do at home—make a huge difference in children's reading ability, in their attitudes toward learning, in the development of socially responsible behaviors and values, in children's performance on standardized test scores, in students' likelihood of graduating from high school, and much more. I maintain a “tip of the iceberg” online summary of parent involvement research studies that I feel are particularly important if you would like to review it.

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