When is it the right time to let your children leave the nest and face life’s hardships alone? I’ll assure you of one thing: that time is not now. At this stage of life, when students embark on the new journey of high school, it is key for parents to remain present and active in their child’s life the whole way. When support is absent from a parental figure during this critical period, it can diminish in several ways.
While traits of parental involvement are based on absence and presence, this can result in both negative and positive effects. Let’s take a look at the positive outcomes of parental involvement. When support is met for students in high school, there tends to be a trend in better performances academically and athletic performance.
“I usually do better at a meet knowing they are there supporting me,” states Ethan Kenworthy, a track athlete at Wilsonville. Whether students are involved in sports, theater, journalism, or other ways in high school, it can be a lot to balance as a young teen, and just the presence of an adult can help ease their child’s mental health.
Grace Alameda explains that if she’s “not having a good game and were losing, I feel better knowing my parents are there cheering me on and not disappointed.” Throughout the years of growing up, a parent’s mentality and amount of support relatively shape their child’s mindset in ways that can prove to be either detrimental or beneficial.
With parental figures being what children look up to and aspire to grow into, their beliefs often reflect those of their figures. This can prove to be negative at times because “if someone you look up to doesn’t care [about school] why should you kind of thing and a lot of kids will take that and think my parents have a job I don’t need this if I can just get a job,” comments Marcus Washington a staff at Wilsonville. When parents fail to see the significance of school themselves, and don’t push their children to seek academic success.
Education is a prominent thing to acquire and “at least having a high school diploma is the base if you have that okay you can get certain jobs, you can decide you want more learning okay you go to college or an apprenticeship like then at least have the base, if you dont have the base then I feel like a lot of people are gonna look over and be less likely to want you,” continues Marcus.
For this reason, parental involvement is often pushed and urged by school settings in a multitude of ways. We see this from elementary school to high school on certain occasions. For instance, in elementary school, parent involvement is encouraged with conferences, and in high school, there are boosters. It’s even shown by the state on Oregon.gov how important this is by providing many resources, such as Parent Engagement Toolkit – America’s Promise Alliance, and Family Engagement: Educator Resources: State of Oregon, to families who struggle with involvement in their child’s education.
