5th November 2010 9:00
By Harriet Boulding
A recent study has shown that school children with pushy parents perform better than parents who take a laissez faire attitude. This is interesting to me as a tutor, because I am usually aware of the opposite problem – parents pushing their children so hard that they burn out. However, I cannot deny that, up to a point, a parent taking an interest in their child’s education is perhaps even more important than having engaged and encouraging teachers.
When pupils come up to secondary school the ability range between 11 year olds is already staggering, despite many having been to the same primary school. Some already have a reading age of 13, and others have a reading age of just 7. This is in part due to the amount of time (if any) that parents spend on reading at home. In class sizes of 30 or more, there is only so much a teacher can do to keep an eye on a student’s progress. Parents, however, are ideally placed to ensure that their child practices key skills everyday.
The study, carried out by Leeds University, also highlighted the interesting point that progress on the part of student and parent is cyclical. Researchers described situations in which the harder a child worked, the more interest parents took in helping them. Of course, ideally parents would encourage their children from the start, as the pattern described by the researchers could easily become a vicious cycle in which children don’t work because they get no encouragement, and parents don’t encourage because the child doesn’t work.
Private tutors can often help bridge this gap, giving the child the encouragement they need and motivating them to work, which results in parents taking more of an interest. However, nothing is a substitute for parents reading to their child every single day from an early age.