It seems obvious that having a strong relationship with your parents would be good for your education. So obvious, really, that you wonder why anyone would even think to question it.
But in a new study, sociologists have found a possible downside. Here’s what they say:
… students who have a positive parent-child relationship are also more likely to want to stay at home for college, which leads to a negative indirect effect on college enrollment. In other words, children who are more strongly connected to their parents find it more difficult to enact the ever-important break from former associations and lifestyles, a break that is fundamental if one wishes to enroll and excel in college.
OK, here come some caveats. One is that the correlation between positive parent-child relationships and desire to stay at home during college was modest. Another is that students who have a positive relationship with their parents tend to make better grades in high school, and of course that’s important for getting into college in the first place. So it’s not as if those who felt less close to their parents were necessarily better students, just that they seemed to have less desire to stay at home during college, which increased their likelihood of enrolling at a four-year institution.
Also, the study lumped together data from two different surveys that looked at all kinds of factors, like communication, family cohesion, and involvement, as measured by responses from students. Parent-child relationships, and all human relationships for that matter, are complicated and resist easy categorization like “positive” or “negative.”
Again from the paper:
Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and close relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year-college graduate.
Maybe. Though as a parent, that’s a chance I’m willing to take.
(The paper is titled “Unanticipated Educational Consequences of a Positive Parent-Child Relationship.” It was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The authors are Ruth N. Lopez Turley, Matthew Desmond, and Sarah K. Bruch. The abstract is here, and a link to what I think is an earlier version of the paper is here.)
6 Responses to Does Liking Your Parents Hurt Your Education?
kevinoconnell - November 1, 2010 at 5:29 am
Well, having a good relationship with your parents might (a) help your education or (b) hinder it and make you (a) less ambitious or (b) more ambitious.
The wonders of modern research.
22221103 - November 1, 2010 at 11:02 am
I’ll bet these researchers didn’t have good relations with their parents and probably the same researchers that denegrate fathers and mothers. Another good reason to get rid of a lot of the research our tax dollars are spent on. What a crock of hogwash.
11191210 - November 1, 2010 at 11:09 am
So apparently I ruined my child. Will that show up when she finishes her graduate degree at an ivy league school at the other end of the country, where she is now? Because it hasn’t shown up yet. I would have said it was her strong relationship with her parents that made her feel safe, independent and confident enough to know it was in her own best interest to “get out of dodge.” My students who refuse to consider leaving the state for graduate school (even though there are no Ph.D. programs in my field in my state) seem a little too attached and doubt their ability to survive far from home.
margee20 - November 1, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Much of the study was using Texas data where the percentage of Hispanic public school students is higher than the national average. It was not clear with a quick read that this was accounted for in the conclusions.
saluki87 - November 1, 2010 at 3:05 pm
I was taught in undergraduate child psych that a strong relationship with parents helped make kids feel secure and thus promoted independence. I am probably not going to get a chance to reach the paper, but it just seems ridiculous for the authors to conclude that “parents who strive to develop an encouraging and close relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year-college graduate.” Maybe there is some good scholarship there somewhere but usually these kinds of studies (and headlines) are just ammunition for those who broadly (and incorrectly) characterize academic research as a waste of money.
11161452 - November 2, 2010 at 12:39 am
In the small nonselective liberal arts college where I taught, we never got Labor Day off because the retention folks were worried the students would go home for that weekend early in the term and never return. This always astounded me–that our new crop of students was made out to be a bunch of fragile adolescents who were “barely at college”. Evidently, there were at least some who were so homesick that they couldn’t bear time away from the family. So yes, if the student is overly-dependent on his helicopter parent, then he may well choose to drop out. So the herd is thinned–nothing bad about that.