Mothers' Union Statuses and Their Involvement in Young Children's Schooling
| Author | Robert Crosnoe,Robert W. Ressler,Shannon Cavanagh,Chelsea Smith |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12374 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
R W. R, C S, S C, R C University
of Texas at Austin
Mothers’ Union Statuses and Their Involvement
in Young Children’s Schooling
U.S. schools often expect the educational
involvement of parents, which may be facili-
tated when parents have partners, especially
a partner also invested in the child. As such,
parental involvement at school and at home
could be a channel of the diverging destinies
of U.S. children from different families. This
study applied xed effects modeling to the Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten
Cohort to examine the link between mothers’
union statuses and their involvement behaviors.
Being partnered appeared to benet mothers’
school and home involvement when children
were in the primary grades, with little evidence
of an additional benet from that partnership
being marital. A biological tie between the male
partner and the child only seemed to matter for
mothers’ school involvement. These patterns did
not vary by family income, maternal depression,
or maternal employment, but they were stronger
when children were just beginning schooling.
Parental involvement in education has long
garnered a great deal of attention both in
terms of theory, such as Lareau’s (2011) con-
certed cultivation thesis, and policy, such as the
family–school compact of No Child Left Behind
(No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 2002).
Department of Sociology, Population Research Center,
University of Texasat Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Stop
G1800, Austin, TX 78712-1699 (rwress@utexas.edu).
Key Words: early childhood, family process, inequality,
parental involvement, schools.
The growing lifelong returns to educational
attainment (Blau & Duncan, 1967; Fischer &
Hout, 2006) and the ever-intensifying norms
about parental management of children’s edu-
cational careers (Crosnoe, 2015) have helped to
increase the potential for parental involvement
to both reect and drive social stratication.
This dimension of contemporary parenting,
therefore, is a crucible in which to investigate
how social conditions, such as parents’ union
statuses, interact with social institutions, such
as the public education system (Alexander,
Entwisle, & Olson, 2014). Because the parental
involvement expected by school personnel and
other families requires effort and follow-through
that may be facilitated when parents have part-
ners, especially one also invested in the child,
advantages in the family context can translate
into advantages in the school context. In this
way, parental involvement is a channel in the
intergenerational transmission of inequality.
In this spirit, this study examines the dynamic
link between mothers’ union statuses and their
involvement in children’s schooling using
data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study–Kindergarten Cohort (https://nces.ed
.gov/ecls/). It leverages xed effects methods
to test hypotheses about the kinds of unions
(partnered vs. unpartnered, married vs. cohabit-
ing, biological ties to child vs. no such ties) that
seem to boost or hinder parental involvement.
Importantly, this study examines these asso-
ciations over time and across different family
contexts as children move through a critical
phase of the primary education system.
94 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (February 2017): 94–109
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12374
Mothers’ Union Statuses and Educational Involvement 95
This study contributes to the family litera-
ture by extending family structure research into
a new domain of parenting to the education lit-
erature by shifting attention to an understudied
family-related source of educational inequality
and to the stratication literature by highlight-
ing how inequality occurs across, not just within,
ecological contexts. It is also policy relevant, as
parental involvement differs from many other
dimensions of parenting, such as parenting styles
or methods of discipline, in that it is viewed as
an appropriate focus of policy that is amenable
to outside intervention (Crosnoe, 2015; No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001, 2002).
P I M
I
Parental involvement in children’s educational
careers is a form of household labor and a
parental investment that requires signicant
time, energy, and emotion work (Erickson &
Cottingham, 2014). It can occur within and out-
side of the physical space of schools. In-school
involvement includes parents’ participation
in school events, parent–teacher conferences,
and school support activities. This dimension
captures parents’ visible presence at schools and
their direct interactions with school personnel
and other parents. The second form concerns the
ways in which parents construct a home learning
environment that supports children’s learning
and cognitive development. These activities
include reading with the child at home, playing
stimulating games with children so that their
learning opportunities extend beyond the school
day, and helping children do arts and crafts.
These behaviors often parallel and support the
learning environment of school (Crosnoe, 2015;
Epstein, 2011).
Increasingly, both types of involvement are
emphasized by schools and educational policy
(Domina, 2005). A large literature suggests that
children benet when parents are involved in
their educational careers in developmentally
appropriate ways. Specically, both in-school
and at-home involvement among parents are
associated with better grades and test scores,
lower participation in problem behavior, and
higher levels of school engagement among
children during the transition into elementary
school (Crosnoe, 2015; Fan & Chen, 2001;
Pomerantz, Moorman, & Litwack, 2007).
Although the underlying causal evidence is not
as strong as advocates of parental involvement
imply (Domina, 2005; Robinson & Harris,
2014), parental involvement remains a source of
stratication among students, especially during
elementary school (Entwisle, Alexander, &
Olson, 1997; Raver, Gershoff, & Aber, 2007).
In some ways, the term parental involvement
is a misnomer because involvementactivities are
much more often carried out by and prioritized
by mothers than fathers, and mothers are judged
more as parents by their engagement in such
activities than are fathers. This gendered nature
of parental involvement is a concrete dimension
of the broader gender division of household
labor in families with children, in which moth-
ers take on most responsibility for managing
the care and development of children (Bianchi,
2000; Craig, 2006; Hochschild & Machung,
2003). Indeed, active management of the edu-
cational activities of children is part of the
contemporary cultural phenomenon of intensive
mothering—child centered, guided by expert
advice, labor intensive, and expensive—that has
taken hold among socioeconomically advan-
taged White women and shapes the dominant
standards of mothering against which all moth-
ers are judged (Hays, 1996). Moreover, although
certain dynamics of nonnuclear families may
result in more adults available to be involved in
a child’s education, mothers still tend to manage
adult involvement overall across families (Hook
& Chalasani, 2008). As a result, mothers are the
primary focus of parental involvement research,
especially when measurement is vague about
which parents are involved and how. This study
follows that tradition.
S C, F S,
M I
The socioeconomic and racialized compo-
nents of intensive mothering are also important
to our understanding of maternal involve-
ment in education. Educational involvement
behaviors—and the expectations that they
provide crucial social and academic boosts
that help children get ahead during the early
stages of their formal schooling—are central
to the predominant class-based contemporary
philosophy of education-focused parenting
detailed so well by Lareau (2011). The valuing
of parental involvement within this philoso-
phy is widespread among socioeconomically
advantaged, typically White, families who
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