Picture two cars in the pick-up queue outside a primary school at ten past three. The families are imaginary, but I suspect most teachers and most parents will recognise them.
In the first car, a nine-year-old climbs in and is asked what she got in her spelling test. Then whether she finished her maths. Then whether her teacher said anything about her reading. Every question comes from care. She answers in single words and watches the traffic.
In the second car, another parent asks what the most interesting part of the day was. Later comes a second question: “Was anything hard today?” The child starts talking about a group task that fell apart and what she might do differently tomorrow.
Both parents are involved. Yet the two conversations are teaching different lessons. The first suggests that school is a list of results to report back. The second suggests that school is something worth thinking about, and that the adults at home are interested in how you think.
Schools put a lot of effort into parental involvement, and usually that means asking parents to be “more involved”. I have come to think the better question is what kind of involvement we are hoping for.
When more is not always better
The title of a 2007 review by Eva Pomerantz, Elizabeth Moorman and Scott Litwack says it plainly: More Is Not Always Better. They note that policy and research had concentrated on how much parents are involved, and argue that how parents get involved determines in large part whether that involvement helps.
They describe the difference in four pairs. Involvement can be autonomy-supportive or controlling. It can focus on the process of learning or on the child’s supposed innate ability. It can be warm or irritable. It can convey confidence in what the child can do, or anxiety about failure. Their examples are strikingly ordinary: a parent helping a child build their own homework timetable, compared with a parent choosing the topic of a school project without asking the child at all.
A meta-analysis by Nancy Hill and Diana Tyson (2009) adds another layer. Across 50 studies of parental involvement in middle school, involvement was generally associated with higher achievement, with one exception: help with homework. The strongest association was with what they call academic socialisation. That means talking about expectations and why education matters, linking schoolwork to future goals, and discussing learning strategies.
Two cautions belong here. These are associations, so they tell us which kinds of involvement tend to sit alongside higher achievement, not that changing one conversation will change a child’s grades. And Hill and Tyson were looking at early adolescence. I work with younger children, so I hold that finding with some care.
Why this is a question about character
Most of that research is about attainment. My own interest is wider. I want to know what children come to believe about why they do things.
In an older study, Wendy Grolnick and Richard Ryan (1989) interviewed the mothers and fathers of children in Grades 3 to 6 and rated how far each parent valued and used approaches that encourage independent problem solving, choice and participation. They called this autonomy support. It was positively related to children’s own reports of autonomous self-regulation, to teachers’ ratings of competence and adjustment, and to grades and achievement.
The authors are honest about the limits. Their data could not settle the direction of influence. Children who already manage themselves well may make autonomy support easier to offer, while children who struggle may draw more control from the adults around them. Grolnick and Ryan suggest the influence probably runs both ways.
Even so, the broad pattern connects with something I care about a great deal: the gap between a child who behaves well because an adult is watching and a child who behaves well because they have made the value their own. I have argued before that compliance is not character. Home is one of the places where that difference takes shape. It is also close to the territory of my doctoral studies, though nothing here should be read as a finding from that unfinished research.
What this might sound like at home
Ask about the doing before the result. “What did you try when it got tricky?” invites a different kind of answer from “What did you get?” The score still matters, but starting with the process tells children it is not the whole story. It is the same principle I explored in what praise quietly teaches: describe what the child did rather than labelling who they are.
Leave room for them to lead. One open question and a genuine pause will often get further than five closed ones.
Be careful about taking over homework. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning, encourages schools to help parents build routines and good homework habits, but is cautious about direct help with homework, particularly for older children. It suggests that helping children set goals, plan, and manage their time, effort and emotions will often be more valuable.
Talk about choices as well as learning. “Did anyone need help today?” “Was there a moment when it was hard to do the right thing?” Then, when a child describes a choice they made, one of the questions at the heart of the Character Loop: “What does that say about you?” The point is to help the child connect an action to the kind of person they are becoming, in their own words.
What schools can do
It would be unfair to put all of this on parents. The EEF guidance notes that levels of parental engagement are consistently associated with better academic outcomes, while the evidence on effective strategies schools can use to engage parents in their children’s learning is mixed. Its recommendations include tailoring school communications to encourage positive dialogue about learning. Messages are likely to work better, it suggests, when they are personalised, linked to learning and positive, and when communication runs both ways.
That is a useful mirror for any school’s messages home. If most of what a family hears from school concerns missing homework, test dates and incidents, we may be quietly inviting the conversation in the first car. A short note that tells parents what the class has been grappling with, and offers one good question to ask about it, invites the second. The same goes for behaviour. When home and school use similar language after something goes wrong, as I described in the questions I ask after a behaviour incident, children meet one consistent message rather than two competing ones.
Concluding thoughts…
I do not think the parent in the first car is doing anything wrong. Tired adults at the end of a long day reach for the questions that are easiest to ask, and results are easy to ask about.
But children are listening to our questions for clues about what matters. A question about a score tells them the score matters. A question about effort, about kindness, about what they would do differently, tells them that their thinking and their choices matter too. Over years of car journeys and kitchen tables, those clues add up.
So perhaps the useful question for schools and families is not how much we are involved. It is what our involvement is teaching. And tomorrow at pick-up, which question will you ask first?
References
Education Endowment Foundation (2018). Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning: Guidance Report. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/supporting-parents
Grolnick, W. S., & Ryan, R. M. (1989). Parent styles associated with children’s self-regulation and competence in school. Journal of Educational Psychology, 81(2), 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.81.2.143
Hill, N. E., & Tyson, D. F. (2009). Parental involvement in middle school: A meta-analytic assessment of the strategies that promote achievement. Developmental Psychology, 45(3), 740–763. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015362
Pomerantz, E. M., Moorman, E. A., & Litwack, S. D. (2007). The how, whom, and why of parents’ involvement in children’s academic lives: More is not always better. Review of Educational Research, 77(3), 373–410. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430305567