Parental Involvement in Their Children's Education

Parentalinvolvement in the children's education in our area is still an insufficientlyresearched construct. It can be implicitly concluded that parental involvementis something that happens by itself. However, referring to previous scientificresearch, the importance of this topic is also noticed through the positiverelationship between desirable child outcomes, such as better school performanceand parental involvement in their education. The family certainly plays a vitalrole in the student's school achievement, i.e., parents contribute to thechild's cognitive development and academic achievement in various ways -preparing the child for school, transmitting educational values, modeling thechild's self-confidence, establishing learning habits, and participating inschool (Reić Ercegovac & Koludrović, 2010). Various scientific papersemphasize that the active participation of parents in the education of thechild implies their physical presence and active participation (SušanjGregorović, 2018). There is still no unambiguous, generally accepted definitiondespite considerable research about parental involvement in the child'seducation. However, there is a consensus that it is a complex, multidimensionalconstruct involving many parenting activities and behaviors related to thechild's entire education and learning process (Epstein, 1990; SušanjGregorović, 2018). Parental involvement in the child's education is manifestedin two ways: involvement in school activities and parental involvement in homeactivities. For the purposes of this paper, the second type of parentalinvolvement is particularly important. According to the available literature,it is divided into two domains (Sušanj Gregorović, 2018), the first of which isparental participation in activities related to knowledge/skills development(Epstein, 2001; Henderson and Mapp, 2002; Ljubetić, 2014), while the otherrefers to participation in learning promotion activities that are not directlyrelated to schoolwork (creating a cognitively stimulating family environment,providing educational materials, etc.) (Henderson and Mapp, 2002;Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, 1997). This paper aims to contribute to thetheoretical knowledge of the construct through a review of previous scientificknowledge and research.