The Influence of Parents on Children’s Mathematics Learning

Parents and families are generally regarded as the primary

educators of children and are responsible for setting down the
social and intellectual foundations for their learning and
development (West, Noden, Edge, & David, 2018). There is a strong
message from the literature that parental encouragement supports
the learning of children, including their growth in numeracy
(Cairney, 2000; Melhuish et al., 2016). For instance, Fan and
Williams (2010) showed that the frequency with which parents
participate in extracurricular activities, such as sports events
and holidays, is positively linked to the self-efficacy of
children towards mathematics and their subsequent
accomplishments; and Chiu and Xihua (2016) showed that the
provision of home learning opportunities and activities, such as
books, music, and discussion.

While these research studies agree that parents have an important

effect on the mathematics learning of children, they concentrate
on relatively young children. Parental engagement can become more
complicated when kids start school. Researchers and policy makers
accept that parental participation in children's school learning
has a positive impact on academic (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2016)
and emotional (Fan & Williams, 2010) outcomes, but evidence
indicates that measures to improve parental involvement levels
are rarely effective in increasing achievement (Gorard & Huat
See, 2018). The meta-analysis of parental involvement strategies
from Gorard and Huat See found insufficient evidence for any
positive impact.

In fact, results in higher quality research showed that

interventions had negative effects on the achievement of pupils.
Similarly, some questions are posed by a recent meta-analysis of
the effects of parental participation in mathematics homework for
children (Patall et al., 2016). While a positive link between
parental involvement in homework and the achievement of children
in reading was found, the influence of parental participation on
the achievement of children in mathematics was negative. This
could contribute to another finding on the differential effects
of various types of parental involvement in homework from this
meta-analysis. There was a positive influence on the success of
children when parents were actively interested in the quality of
homework. However there was a negative impact when participation
consisted of merely tracking homework completion.

Research from elsewhere in the literature (e.g., Peters, Seeds,

Goldstein, & Coleman, 2016) indicates that because of their own
attitudes towards and levels of achievement in mathematics,
parents may find it more difficult to provide support and help
with children's mathematics homework than in other subject areas,
such as reading and writing. Then we are faced with a kind of
paradox, whereby correlational studies of parental involvement in
education show uniformly positive effects on the achievement of
pupils, but attempts by schools to raise parental involvement
levels appear to have either no effect or a negative impact on
mathematics achievement. We propose that it may be beneficial to
differentiate between two separate approaches to parental
involvement, generally described as school-centered and parent-
centered, in order to resolve this issue.

Then we are faced with a kind of paradox, whereby correlational

studies of parental involvement in education show uniformly
positive effects on the achievement of pupils, but attempts by
schools to raise parental involvement levels appear to have
either no effect or a negative impact on mathematics achievement.
We propose that it may be beneficial to differentiate between two
separate approaches to parental involvement, generally described
as school-centered and parent-centered, in order to resolve this
issue.

School-Centered Approaches to Parental Involvement in Children’s

Mathematics Learning

We apply to school-centered and parent-centered approaches to

parental participation in the learning of mathematics for
children in this article. As defined by Goodall and Montgomery,
these two methods can be interpreted as reflecting two ends of a
spectrum between parental involvement and parental commitment
(2017). Goodall and Montgomery say that the greatest advantages
for children's learning come from the end of the continuum of
"parent engagement," which we describe here as "parent-centered"
methods, where parents define the types of learning activities
that take place outside of school. On the contrary, parents are
passive recipients of data at the "parent involvement" end of the
spectrum, which we identified here as "school-centered" methods,
and their position is that they "help the teacher" by conducting
school-defined learning activities at home.

According to Goodall and Montgomery, while this activity of

'parent-involvement' can provide a valuable framework for further
work, it is unlikely in itself to have major benefits for the
learning of children. Instead of the terms "parental involvement"
and "parental engagement," we prefer the terms "school-centered"
and "parent-centered" as they more specifically connote the ways
in which parent and child learning experiences are organized and
motivated. We also tend to concentrate on these two sets of
methods, rather than the more finely graduated spectrum of
Goodall and Montgomery, since in many schools or in most of the
literature, we do not see proof of the entire continuum. While
the model of Goodall and Montgomery is useful in defining
alternative models of contact and activity between parents and
schools, we believe it provides an idealized model of parental
engagement in the learning of children.

Then by "school-centered," we mean methods that concentrate on

parents participating in activities where the primary goal is to
help children learn elements of the school mathematics curriculum
and where teachers and schools set and define activities. For
example, common practices in English primary schools are to ask
parents to help their kids learn or practice their timestables
and/or to invite parents to workshops on arithmetic methods used
in the classroom. In comparison, a parent-centered approach
focuses on activities, as defined by parents and families, that
occur in everyday family life. This chapter addresses some of the
issues related to school-centered approaches and examines
explanations why these approaches do not contribute to higher
levels of pupil achievement or mathematics participation.

Factors Affecting Parental-Involvement

Peters et al. indicated that the lack of trust in helping with

homework was primarily due to parents' confusion of what their
children do and the inconsistencies between the existing teaching
approaches and their own experiences. Factors such as cultural
variations or historical developments may be the product of
contradictions with school-like mathematics types. Parents may
hide their mathematics methods from their kids so that they can
learn the methods of schools (de Abreu & Cline, 2017), and some
may feel excluded from helping their kids because they do not
understand the importance of new approaches to mathematics
teaching (McMullen & de Abreu, 2017).

The decline in adult numeracy skills in England seems to be

followed by a generalized "I can't do maths" mentality
(Department of Industry, Creativity and Skills [BIS], 2017;
National Institute of Adult Continuing Education [NIACE], 2017),
which has been highlighted as a major barrier to parental
participation (Williams, 2016).

Homework is also used by schools to try to improve parental

interest levels in the learning of children. Although statistics
on the frequency of setting math homework in primary schools in
the United Kingdom are not accessible, our experience and
anecdotal evidence indicate that many schools set math homework
for children from the first year of primary school, when children
are 5 years of age, and that parents are generally encouraged to
explicitly help children with the completion of task.

There is evidence to indicate that homework may not be successful

in improving achievement and may have detrimental effects on the
attitude of pupils towards mathematics. The above-mentioned work
of Patall et al. (2016) found that higher levels of parental
participation in homework were correlated with lower pupil
achievement levels. Farrow, Tymms, and Henderson (2018) in the
United Kingdom found that homework set more often than once a
month had a detrimental effect on the attainment of pupils.
Results from studies such as Solomon, Warin, and Lewis (2018)
indicate that secondary-level homework may be a source of major
conflict between parents and children, since often parents do not
feel that they have the opportunity to support, while at the same
time being conscious of the pressure to excel in mathematics.
There is however a discrepancy in the literature concerning the
reasons why mathematics homework and parental participation in
mathematics homework may have a negative impact on the
achievement and attitudes of children at the primary level.

Parent-Centered Approaches to Parental Involvement in Children’s

Mathematics Learning

Families also experience problem-solving conditions that require

significant mathematical knowledge and practice to be developed
(Goldman & Booker, 2015). Home mathematics research consistently
shows that families frequently draw on distinctive information
tools that include a variety of data, skills, and strategies that
can be qualitatively different from, but equally successful as,
the mathematical knowledge taught in school by children (Baker,
Street, & Tomlin, 2016; González, Moll, & Amanti, 2017). Some
attempts to connect home and school mathematics show that day-to-
day household circumstances provide children with a background
rich in opportunities to learn and apply various types of
mathematics (Winter, Salway, Yee, & Hughes, 2015).

While these studies collectively indicate that it is possible to

identify the family and home setting as a promising source of
mathematical thought and action, it is not clear that parents
always understand the potential of these types of home activity
for mathematics learning for children.

There is proof that it is difficult for schools to integrate out-

of-school experience into classroom learning (Hughes & Pollard,
2016). This is due in part to the diversity of the experiences of
children outside school, and the dissimilarity between the
experiences of pupils and teachers. There is a growing literature
from the United States with associated observations, in addition
to the work of Hughes and colleagues in the United Kingdom.

"A significant amount of study has been carried out using the
conceptual framework of "funds of information" (González et al.,
2015). What is evident from studies such as those mentioned in
Civil and Andrade (2018) is that a huge amount of work is needed
to bridge the gap between the information capital of families
(related to home mathematics) and the knowledge related to
classroom mathematics. This is due to many reasons, but one that
seems to be shared between the contexts of the United States and
the United Kingdom involves the valorization of education (de
Abreu 2019, 2018), including conceptions of "what counts" as
mathematics, or what kind of learning is sufficient for the
classroom.