Good parenting is getting involved with your children’s education and creating an enjoyable experience for them. Bad parenting is dropping all the responsibility on the schools to do all the work you’re supposed to be doing and then blaming the school for your own children’s failures. This is true regarding math homework, according to researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published in Child Development.
One way of creating such good experiences for children is the responses and attitudes of their parents because unfortunately, many parents are filled with feelings of frustration and ineptitude with math homework, thus leading to poor responses to math from their children.
The study involved 483 parents of first and second graders that reported their involvement in their children’s math homework and learning activities. For each day the parents were involved with their children’s math homework tasks, they responded to an online survey regarding the feelings such as happiness, contentedness, irritability, frustration, self-confidence, and efficacy.
Unfortunately for this study, and men, the majority of the parents involved were mothers at approximately 80%. Which in of itself already shows you the poor quality fathering we have in our society.
At 30 days after the study and then one year later, researchers assessed the children’s interest in math and preferences for challenging math problems by asking to create a worksheet by choosing set of problems that ranged from easy to more difficult. Furthermore, their knowledge, calculation skills, and quantitative reasoning were all also assessed.
The result showed that the more efficacious parents felt in their involvement with their children’s math activities, the more math activities their children engaged in. Parental efficacy also improved when they supported their children’s autonomy and encouraged them to solve problems their own way.
So to those parents who whine and complain either in front of their children or to their teachers about homework and the need for your involvement, you’re being a shitty parent because your bad attitude is doing nothing but limiting and prohibiting your children to a better future. And as fathers, you all need to get involved more. That 80% respondents being mothers is just sad.
As bonus, this study shows that as parent, you don’t even have to excellent or super knowledgeable in math, you just have to have a good attitude and supportive.
J Wu et al. Parents’ daily involvement in children’s math homework and activities during early elementary school. Child Development. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13774
