Parents can influence the academic success of their children

Experts stress the need to explore what the child wants to achieve and the types of possibilities available for that.

Not only does how parents treat their children psychologically, German researchers have found that parents can also decisively influence children's academic success.

It is true that the existence of a close correlation between children's upbringing in the care of their parents and achieving good performance in school is not a new thing, but the study of German researchers clarified the factors that play a special role in achieving this.

Doris Holzberger of the Technical University of Munich said that it is particularly helpful for “parents to discuss expectations with their children, talk about potential achievements, diplomas and career paths, discuss learning strategies, and communicate as differently as possible with their children when praise and criticism of school work.” Detailed checking of homework is not very helpful.

To reach these findings, Holzberger and her team evaluated 18 comprehensive studies comprising 1,700 individual studies.

"The most important finding is that parents can influence school performance and motivate pupils through their behaviour," the school research professor added.

Providing a stimulating environment for learning, lots of books, going with the child to the library, and achieving tangible goals are beautiful things

Holzberger emphasized that “providing a stimulating environment for learning, lots of books, and going with the child to the library is a beautiful and good thing. But by comparing the impact of this with the effect of discussions and consultations about school and education, its impact is clearly less on the performance of students.”

The German researcher stressed the need to explore what the child wants to achieve and the quality of the possibilities available for that, explaining that even when dealing with each subject separately, concrete goals can be set as much as possible, and children and adolescents are encouraged and rewarded with an appropriate comment on their work.

Holzberger called for "praise and criticism to be always concrete and differentiated", and in return stressed that discussions about the importance of education in general are not very effective.

Research has proven that the positive participation of parents increases students’ achievements, reduces their bad behavior, encourages them to attend and increases their sense of satisfaction in school, and that students whose parents do not participate in the educational process get the lowest grades and become more vulnerable to problems at school and do not feel happy in it.