Pamela Mackowski's Profile

Many educators and parents would agree that it’s important for parents to spend time in their children’s classrooms, to closely monitor homework, or to read to children at home.

Try telling that, though, to a 13-year-old, argues Harvard University researcher Nancy E. Hill.

In a series of studies and a new book, Ms. Hill makes the case that both research and policy initiatives aimed at promoting parent involvement fail to take into account the distinct needs of adolescents, a group of students that seems biologically driven to break free of parental vigilance.

“Having your parents involved in a field trip is not wholly consistent with what an adolescent wants,” said Ms. Hill, an education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the university’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Moreover, studies are beginning to show that such activities may not be nearly as important for promoting educational success as other things parents might be doing at home at this stage in their children’s development.

“When you look at parent-adolescent relationships, you see kids pushing back on decisions they want to have control of,” Ms. Hill said, “and it’s much harder for parents to call schools and find out how kids are doing holistically, because they have so many teachers and their teachers see over 100 students a day. We’ve given [parents and teachers] an impossible task.”

“If we’re not going to change the middle school structure,” she added, “how do we help parents navigate it in ways that are consistent with where students are developmentally?”

The focus of the research is timely. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires most schools to enact policies on parent involvement, but it makes no mention of how those efforts in middle and high schools might differ from those in elementary schools, which have been the focus of most of the research on parent involvement until recently.

For the new book, Families, Schools, and the Adolescent, which was published in August by Teachers College Press, Ms. Hill and her co-editor, Ruth K. Chao of the University of California, Riverside, recruited scholars from a variety of disciplines to share some newer findings on family-school partnerships at the secondary school level.

Before the book’s publication, Ms. Hill systematically analyzed 50 studies on parent involvement. The resulting paper was published last spring in the journal Developmental Psychology.

What Ms. Hill found, interestingly, was that some previous reviews of research on family-school partnerships, while pointing to overall academic benefits for students, had lumped together studies of elementary schools with those of middle and high schools.

“I think it may be because many of the analyses were done from an education perspective, and school districts make policy for grades K-12,” Ms. Hill surmised.

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