1. Introduction

The relationship between parental involvement and academic performance requires further research. To begin with, what is parental involvement? Parental involvement can be described as six types of home-school relation: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making and collaborating with the community [1]. Parental involvement contributes to the collaboration between the parents and the activities that are provided in their children’s schools [2]. Also, different types of involvements occur, such as volunteering work, homework involvement, attending events, and talking to members of staff [3]. Parental involvement not only refers to the involvement in certain areas, but also the parental attitudes, behavior and style that occurred during the event within or outside of the school settings. Over the past 50 years, the number of parents who are spending time with their kids has increased. This is because many improvements have been made with parents who choose to be more engaged with their children. For example, many more parents are choosing to be active in helping their kids with their homework and incorporating education into family leisure activities [4]. Parental involvement had a positive correlation that demonstrated how it can provide their child potential benefits in their education, therefore, investigating how parent’s engagement relates to children’s education is significant [5].

There are many related studies on parental involvement and their children’s grades, such as the level of parental involvement in children’s learning at home and school is strongly influenced by the family’s socioeconomic status [6]. Parents who have a low socio-economic status tend to have fewer years of education, and most of them may experience negative feedback during their years in school. This is because, many children from families who are low in socioeconomic status, their parents tend not to support their child in academics, which can lead to stress and poor experience in school [7]. Therefore, they may have felt of not being able to get involved with their children’s education due to the differences in environment and ethics with the schooling system [6]. Moreover, parents who have a different background such as families from different counties and cultures are more likely to get avoided by teachers in school. These teachers are also more likely to believe that these parents are less interested in their kids’ education [6]. Language barriers are also a key to parental involvement in schools. This is because some foreign families who come from another country may not speak or understand the same language, as a result, this causes difficulties in communication between school staff members and also in participating in grouped activities [6].

In this paper, the amount of parental involvement in affecting their children’s grades is being investigated, as well as the involvement in both school and at home. Research findings on parental involvement are first briefly viewed and then discussed. Some of the questions that are considered in asking include: Does the level of parental involvement affect the children’s grades? What kind of involvement affects the children’s education the most? What expectations do parents have for their children? Has the amount of parental involvement in the education of their kids changed over the past few years? Are there any differences between different cultured families that may influence the parents’ engagement in their children’s education?

2. Method

The literature research was conducted using the database Google Scholar, Sci-hub and some websites. The following terms and their derivatives that related to this topic were entered: parental involvement, children, grade, academic, achievement, performance, outcome, and education. Studies were selected according to the following criteria:(ⅰ) include the empirical data (contains the data from the cases to the investigations), (ⅱ) the association between the relationship of parental involvement and the children’s academics, (ⅲ) contains cases from different areas and countries (ⅳ) without the time limitation. Some factors which affect the children’s motivations in education can also be included in the studies that were chosen because these motivations will influence the achievement of children.

3. Literature Review

To begin with, most research showed that the level of parental involvement has a magnificent impact on the children’s academics, however, most experimented kids are in their early years for example year ones and twos. For example, research by Donna Berthelsen and Sue Walker did an experiment on the parents’ involvement in their children’s education. The aim for them was to find out the relationship between parental involvement and children’s learning competence. To investigate this, they collected data that were related. The first one was the analysis of Wave 2 data from Growing Up in Australia, a longitudinal study of Australian Children. The two data collected were about age four or students in years one and two. There were also a few questions that were carried out through their investigation. For example, what expectations do parents have for their child’s education? And does parental involvement predict a child’s learning competence? Etc. By looking at these questions, this report found out that there are many more perspectives that can be investigated. Such as the prediction of children’s learning competence, and the different perspectives that may be involved while investigating. The study further explores the impact of teachers on the involvement of parents. For example, does the teacher or classmates affect the involvement of parents, and does it relate to how it affects a child’s academic behaviors? Therefore, this actively demonstrates that the involvements that influence most children’s education are factors related to education. For example, the involvement in school, participation in school activities, and helping out with homework [6].

The teachers may be a factor that can be influence the involvement of parents, which could also affect the child’s education. First of all, many teachers judge the degree of involvement of parents in their child’s education [6]. To do this, there were surveys carried out by the teachers to let parents answer them. The surveys contained questions like “In your opinion, how involved are this child’s parents in her/his learning and education? And the response options were “very involved”, “somewhat involved”, and “not involved” The responses were that 60 percent of parents believed that they were very involved in their child’s education, and that 37 percent of parents were somewhat involved [6]. This showed that most parents are capable and are knowledgeable to know that parents should be somewhat involved in their child’s education which is a benefit. Moreover, many schools have also created practices to improve the involvement of parents. One of the things was parent orientation activities early in the years, these included things like creating meetings with parents. Also, formal parent-teacher mattings about a child’s progress are to ensure the child is keeping up with their work and that the child is having satisfaction at school, which allows parents to understand the recent activities that the children had in school and increase the involvement in them. Moreover, not only formal parent-teacher conferences are important, but parent-student conferences are also just as important. This is because, it allows students to lead the conference process which gives them an opportunity to present themselves and know their own progress in school. It also allows the child to interact with parents which increases the parent’s involvement in their child’s learning [8]. In addition, parent participation in programs is another form of involvement, which includes classr8oom volunteering and activities that allow parents to promote contact and support to students [6].

Parental involvement is the active participation of parents in all aspects of their children’s social, emotional and academic development [9]. It can be divided into generally two occasions: parent-to-parent communication and parent–teacher communication [9]. In parent-to-parent communication, parental involvement includes helping children with their homework, participating in the decision-making process and imparting parental values [2,3,10,11]. Another one, parent–teacher communication contains more various ways, such as attending open houses [10], visiting the child’s classroom, sharing expertise or experience with the class through guest speaking, taking on leadership roles in the school [11], school political involvement, talking to staff, talking to teachers [3], keeping abreast of academic progress, and participating in parent meetings [2]. All the concepts above treat parental involvement in a macroscopic dimension. From the perspective of William H. Jeyney there is a subtle aspect of it, such as high expectations, communication, and parental style [4]. In 2015, María Castro and some researchers were also concerned that parental involvement including parental expectations about their children's academic future, they also mentioned the extent of the specific thing’s parents do for their children. Conclusions are made that the concepts of parental involvement have not much changed in recent years. However, people’s view of treating it has changed from more macroscopic ways to more microscopic ways, from acting the behaviors of helping their children into paying more attention to the feelings of their children.

Investigating deeper into the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic performance, there are differences between each area and county. The research of parental involvement in Ghana is one of the studies that have been done in developed country and can contribute to fill the gap in this area. This study used baseline data from the Ghana Youth Save Experiment, which is a cluster randomized longitudinal study by interviewing children’s parents. These children were randomly chosen from 100 schools which was chosen from 8 regions of Ghana. The children from 50 schools were experiment group, another 50 were control group. There were totally 6252 children joining this research. Through the descriptive statistics and bivariate tests, comparing with the children whose parents have been interviewed and have not been ones, there is a significant difference in the aspect of socioeconomic between them. The children whose parents have been interviewed comes from the household with more assert. The researchers used the primary and general SEM model which includes the directional relationship from every potential factor (parental involvement at home and in the school) to four indicators of academic performance. To be specifically, the parental involvement at home and in the school have different impact on different subject. The parental involvement at home will influence more on children’s English score than on the Math. The parental involvement in the school has the opposite effect. Additionally, on average, the absolute value of the effect size of parental involvement at home was slightly higher than one in the school. The limitation of this research is that it only finds two subjects to observe the effect of the parental involvement on children’s academic performance. The data is cross-sectional, so the cause-and-effect cannot be determined [12, 13]. To emphasis the importance of parental involvement on children’s academic performance and to motivate the parents to participate in children’s study, research in Thailand has been done to improve the methods which promotes parents to involve. The researchers used questionnaires to collects some basic information about the parents, such as their ages, jobs and so on. This study consists of the data from 12 parents. Then, they did the interview with the children to determine the extent of the parental involvement. Therefore, they used the document analyses to help them to determine the effect of parental involvement on children’s academic performance. For the data analysis, they applied simple percentages and graphs to showcase the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic performance. The result illustrated the topic from two aspects. One is the influence of demographic variables. Through the result, it showed that the ages of all the parents had slightly difference. The parents who are below 50 years old are more than those who are above 50 years old, their percentages are 58% and 42%. The similarity of them is that all of the participants got married. Some differences between the interviewed parents who involved in children’s academic performance and those who did not involve are that the average educational level of involved parents is higher than those of uninvolved parents. 80% of involved parents had bachelor’s degree, and 90% of uninvolved parents had a secondary and primary level of education. What’s more, the average monthly income of involved parents is also higher than those of uninvolved parents. Most of involved parents could earned THB 30,000-70,0000. Another aspect is the level of the parental involvement. It found that the parents with high involvement had positive impact on children’s academic performance, while parents with lower involvement had negative impact on it. The study compared the average score of some subjects of children in these two situations and made a conclusion. The limitation of this research is that it gained the data only from one specific school, so the future advice of parental involvement might only fit on the situation in this school [14]. To fill up the gap of this topic in Chile, the researchers chose 498 parents or guardians to do this study. The data of students were from the record of the school, and the data of teachers were collected by the paper record in the teachers’ conference. Using hierarchical cluster analysis and basing on five subscales of parental involvement scale, the researchers concluded that it existed three situations of parental involvement (high, medium, low), and average academic performance of the children who have high and medium parental involvement is higher than those of the children who have low parental involvement [15].In a study about this topic in Spain, the researchers randomly selected 35 students by the system and gained their score of many subjects. The conclusion of this study was that the controlling and communicative styles between parents and children had positive relation with the children’s academic performance [16]. From these several researchers, this study can conclude that parental involvement in different countries or areas have impact on children’s academic performance. Compared with the parents who did not involve in children’s study, the parents who involve in had higher educational level and they have more financial support. The relationship between the parental involvement and children’s academic performance is positive.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the influence of parental involvement on children’s academic performances. We also reviewed literature from Google Scholars and discussed the topic from different aspects: The factors that will affect parental involvement, the stage of the influence, the exact definition of parental involvement and the results from different areas and countries. We found that the definition of parental involvement can be categorized into two occasions. On one occasion looking at the involvement at home and school. The other area focuses on the extended ideas and examples relating to parental involvement.

As a general principle, the relation between parental involvement is quite similar in different backgrounds and countries. However, there are some differences between the areas and countries regarding the definition of parental involvement and the factors that will affect the influence. All of these literature articles relate to parents and their children, and some of them have a connection with the teachers and schools. Therefore, it is recommended that the reviews discussed be a way to improve parental involvement in education. Education is one of the most important parts of our lives and in societies. Therefore, we aim to highlight this topic to draw parents’ attention to it, which then helps parents to identify effective methods for tutoring their child, whilst supporting their child’s education. It is also an effective opportunity for schools and teachers to provide suitable suggestions to parents in involving their child’s academic performances.

Authors Contribution

All the authors contributed equally and their names were listed in alphabetical order.