family expectations or problems essay

Essay about Family: What It Is and How to Nail It

Humans naturally seek belonging within families, finding comfort in knowing someone always cares. Yet, families can also stir up insecurities and mental health struggles.

Family dynamics continue to intrigue researchers across different fields. Every year, new studies explore how these relationships shape our minds and emotions.

In this article, our dissertation service will guide you through writing a family essay. You can also dive into our list of topics for inspiration and explore some standout examples to spark your creativity.

What is Family Essay

A family essay takes a close look at the bonds and experiences within families. It's a common academic assignment, especially in subjects like sociology, psychology, and literature.

So, what's involved exactly? Simply put, it's an exploration of what family signifies to you. You might reflect on cherished family memories or contemplate the portrayal of families in various media.

What sets a family essay apart is its personal touch. It allows you to express your own thoughts and experiences. Moreover, it's versatile – you can analyze family dynamics, reminisce about family customs, or explore other facets of familial life.

If you're feeling uncertain about how to write an essay about family, don't worry; you can explore different perspectives and select topics that resonate with various aspects of family life.

Tips For Writing An Essay On Family Topics

A family essay typically follows a free-form style, unless specified otherwise, and adheres to the classic 5-paragraph structure. As you jot down your thoughts, aim to infuse your essay with inspiration and the essence of creative writing, unless your family essay topics lean towards complexity or science.

Here are some easy-to-follow tips from our essay service experts:

Focus on a Specific Aspect: Instead of a broad overview, delve into a specific angle that piques your interest, such as exploring how birth order influences sibling dynamics or examining the evolving role of grandparents in modern families.
Share Personal Anecdotes: Start your family essay introduction with a personal touch by sharing stories from your own experiences. Whether it's about a favorite tradition, a special trip, or a tough time, these stories make your writing more interesting.
Use Real-life Examples: Illustrate your points with concrete examples or anecdotes. Draw from sources like movies, books, historical events, or personal interviews to bring your ideas to life.
Explore Cultural Diversity: Consider the diverse array of family structures across different cultures. Compare traditional values, extended family systems, or the unique hurdles faced by multicultural families.
Take a Stance: Engage with contentious topics such as homeschooling, reproductive technologies, or governmental policies impacting families. Ensure your arguments are supported by solid evidence.
Delve into Psychology: Explore the psychological underpinnings of family dynamics, touching on concepts like attachment theory, childhood trauma, or patterns of dysfunction within families.
Emphasize Positivity: Share uplifting stories of families overcoming adversity or discuss strategies for nurturing strong, supportive family bonds.
Offer Practical Solutions: Wrap up your essay by proposing actionable solutions to common family challenges, such as fostering better communication, achieving work-life balance, or advocating for family-friendly policies.

Family Essay Topics

When it comes to writing, essay topics about family are often considered easier because we're intimately familiar with our own families. The more you understand about your family dynamics, traditions, and experiences, the clearer your ideas become.

If you're feeling uninspired or unsure of where to start, don't worry! Below, we have compiled a list of good family essay topics to help get your creative juices flowing. Whether you're assigned this type of essay or simply want to explore the topic, these suggestions from our history essay writer are tailored to spark your imagination and prompt meaningful reflection on different aspects of family life.

So, take a moment to peruse the list. Choose the essay topics about family that resonate most with you. Then, dive in and start exploring your family's stories, traditions, and connections through your writing.

Supporting Family Through Tough Times
Staying Connected with Relatives
Empathy and Compassion in Family Life
Strengthening Bonds Through Family Gatherings
Quality Time with Family: How Vital Is It?
Navigating Family Relationships Across Generations
Learning Kindness and Generosity in a Large Family
Communication in Healthy Family Dynamics
Forgiveness in Family Conflict Resolution
Building Trust Among Extended Family
Defining Family in Today's World
Understanding Nuclear Family: Various Views and Cultural Differences
Understanding Family Dynamics: Relationships Within the Family Unit
What Defines a Family Member?
Modernizing the Nuclear Family Concept
Exploring Shared Beliefs Among Family Members
Evolution of the Concept of Family Love Over Time
Examining Family Expectations
Modern Standards and the Idea of an Ideal Family
Life Experiences and Perceptions of Family Life
Genetics and Extended Family Connections
Utilizing Family Trees for Ancestral Links
The Role of Younger Siblings in Family Dynamics
Tracing Family History Through Oral Tradition and Genealogy
Tracing Family Values Through Your Family Tree
Exploring Your Elder Sister's Legacy in the Family Tree
Connecting Daily Habits to Family History
Documenting and Preserving Your Family's Legacy
Navigating Online Records and DNA Testing for Family History
Tradition as a Tool for Family Resilience
Involving Family in Daily Life to Maintain Traditions
Creating New Traditions for a Small Family
The Role of Traditions in Family Happiness
Family Recipes and Bonding at House Parties
Quality Time: The Secret Tradition for Family Happiness
The Joy of Cousins Visiting for Christmas
Including Family in Birthday Celebrations
Balancing Traditions and Unconditional Love
Building Family Bonds Through Traditions

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Family Essay Example

For a better grasp of the essay on family, our team of skilled writers has crafted a great example. It looks into the subject matter, allowing you to explore and understand the intricacies involved in creating compelling family essays. So, check out our meticulously crafted sample to discover how to craft essays that are not only well-written but also thought-provoking and impactful.

Final Outlook

In wrapping up, let's remember: a family essay gives students a chance to showcase their academic skills and creativity by sharing personal stories. However, it's important to stick to academic standards when writing about these topics. We hope our list of topics sparked your creativity and got you on your way to a reflective journey. And if you hit a rough patch, you can just ask us to ' do my essay for me ' for top-notch results!

Having Trouble with Your Essay on the Family?

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FAQs on Writing an Essay about Family

Family essays seem like something school children could be assigned at elementary schools, but family is no less important than climate change for our society today, and therefore it is one of the most central research themes.

Below you will find a list of frequently asked questions on family-related topics. Before you conduct research, scroll through them and find out how to write an essay about your family.

How to Write an Essay About Your Family History?

How to write an essay about a family member, how to write an essay about family and roots, how to write an essay about the importance of family.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Family Relationships — The Importance of Family Problems and their Solutions

The Importance of Family Problems and Their Solutions

Categories: Family Relationships

About this sample

Words: 510 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 510 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Families play a vital role in society, financial difficulties are a leading cause of family problems, the effects of family problems can be far-reaching and long-lasting, solutions to family problems vary depending on the nature of the issue, prevention is always better than cure.

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79 Family Problems Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best family problems topic ideas & essay examples, 🥇 most interesting family problems topics to write about, 📌 simple & easy family problems essay titles, ❓ research questions about family problems.

Family and Culture: Major Problems Facing Families Around the World Many of these family changes have come because of the result of globalization, which has occurred mainly due to the sophisticated technology available in the current world.
Vulnerable Families: Problems With Access to Healthcare Families with complex needs or vulnerable families are terms used to describe the families with particular disadvantages in access to healthcare.
The American Family: Current Problems It seems that the American families are under strain because there is a lack of a normative structure that would provide the parents with the necessary tools to orient their families.
Marriage and Family Problems as Social Issues Sociology as a discipline has an extremely wide range of interests and it is next to impossible even to enumerate them, however the issue that has always been of the utmost importance for the sociological […]
Family Assessment in a Problem Oriented Record According to the available information the power relations in the family is on his side and the bulk of family responsibilities are reserved for Naomi.
Problem-Solving: Adolescent and Family However, it is possible to conclude that the reason for Brandon’s stress is his biased attitude towards his father and his father’s girlfriend, not only in his being abused by his father.
The Problem of Work-Family Imbalance in Society The absence of the mother in the family probably contributes to the work-family imbalance problem that Chris is facing in raising his son.
Problems in Marriage – The Weakening of Families The nuclear family begins from the father followed by the mother and then the children while the extended family begins from the grandfather down to the youngest grandchild in the family.
Relation of Family Problems to Patterns of Delinquent Involvement Among Urban Youth
Family Problems Among Recently Returned Military Veterans Referred for a Mental Health Evaluation
Psychological and Family Problems Associated With Learning Disabilities: Assessment and Intervention
Assessing Individual Family Members’ Constructions of Family Problems
Economic Problems Causing Marriage and Family Problems
Elderly Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, and Proposed Solutions to These Two Family Problems
Determinants of Work-Related Family Problems Among Employed Parents
Matching Family Problems With Specific Family Preservation Services
Coping Profiles Associated With Psychiatric, Physical Health, Work, and Family Problems
Wrestling With Expatriate Family Problems: Japanese Experience in East Asia
Family Problems and Relationships for Adults With Borderline Personality Disorder
Treatment of Family Problems in Autism
Crack and Cocaine Users and Family Problems Caused by Their Addiction
Effects of Parental Divorce and Memories of Family Problems on Relationships Between Adult Children and Their Parents
The Association of Alcohol and Family Problems in a Remote Indigenous Australian Community
Relationship Between Suicidal Ideation and Family Problems Among Young Callers to the Japanese Crisis Hotline
Work Status, Financial Stress, Family Problems, and Gender Differences in the Prevalence of Depression in Chile
Delinquency and Family Problems in Incarcerated Adolescents With and Without a History of Inhalant Use
Conceptual Issues in Measuring and Assessing Family Problems
The Influence of Family Problems and Conflicts on Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts in Elderly People
Producing Family Problems: Organization and Uses of the Family Perspective and Rhetoric in Family Therapy
Identity Status of Turkish University Students in Relation to Their Evaluation of Family Problems
Interactions of Gender and Race in Workers’ Help Seeking for Family Problems: Perceptions of Supervisor Support and Intervention
The Relationships Among Family Problems, Friends’ Troubled Behavior, and High Risk Youths’ Alcohol Use and Delinquent Behavior
Conditions Not Attributable to a Mental Disorder: An Epidemiological Study of Family Problems
Preventing Family Problems: Troubling Trends and Promising Opportunities
Use of School and Community Health Care Resources for Behavioral, Educational, and Social-Family Problems
An Evaluation of the Psychosocial Problems of the Homebound Cancer Patient: Patient Adjustment and Family Problems
Female Gender, Marital and Family Problems, and Feelings of Guilt Are Related to Self-Immolation Suicide Attempts
Prisoner Re-Entry, Family Problems and State Coercion in the Era of Neoliberalism
Gender Differences in an Exploratory Model of Family Problems and Stress-Related Experiences Among Justice-Involved Youth
Baccalaureate Student Perceptions of Challenging Family Problems: Building Bridges to Acceptance
Family Problems and Sports Performance: The Role of Couple’s Therapy in Treating Athletes and Their Families
Family Problems and Family Therapy in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Family Problems, Mental Health and Trauma Experiences of Justice-Involved Youth
Another Look at the Diagnosis and Treatment of Orthodox Jewish Family Problems
Police Intervention Into Family Crisis: The Role of Law Enforcement in Family Problems
Family Problems and Children’s Competencies Over the Early Elementary School Years
Family Problems Associated With the Presence of a Child With Handicap in Nigeria
The Secondary Emotional, Social, and Family Problems Found With Children and Adolescents With Learning Disabilities
How Can We Solve Family Problems?
What Are the Possible Consequences of Family Problems for Children?
How Do Teens Deal With Family Problems?
Will It Be Easier to Let Go With Families Problems by Ignoring Them, Instead of Always Thinking About Them?
What Are the Family Problems That Arise After Marriage?
What Are the Biggest Contemporary Family Problems?
How To Avoid Marital Problems With Teens?
Is Domestic Violence One of the Graetest Family Problems?
What Are the Four Types of Family Problems?
Which Are the Worst Family Problems That You Have Ever Faced?
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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Family Conflict Is Normal; It’s the Repair That Matters

Three months into the pandemic, I had the urge to see my 28-year-old daughter and her husband, 2,000 miles away. She had weathered an acute health crisis, followed by community protests that propelled them both onto the streets to serve food and clean up neighborhoods. They were coping, but the accumulation of challenges made the mom in me want to connect with and support them. So, together with my husband, my other daughter, and her husband, our family of six adults and two dogs formed a new pod inside my daughter’s home in the steamy heat of the Minneapolis summer.

As I packed, a wisp of doubt crept in. We six hadn’t lived together under the same roof, ever . Would I blow it? Would I “flap my lips,” as a friend calls it, and accidentally say something hurtful? Some time back, in a careless moment of exhaustion, I had insulted my brand-new son-in-law with a thoughtless remark. He was rightfully hurt, and it took a long letter and a phone call to get us back on track.

My own siblings and I were raised inside the intractable rupture that was my parents’ marriage. Their lifelong conflict sowed discord and division in everyone around them. I worked hard to create a different, positive family climate with my husband and our children. My old ghosts were haunting me, though, and I didn’t want to ruin a good thing.

Yet research shows that it’s not realistic, or possible, or even healthy to expect that our relationships will be harmonious all the time. Everything we know from developmental science and research on families suggests that rifts will happen—and what matters more is how you respond to them. With many families spending more time together than ever now, there are ample opportunities for tension and hurt feelings. These moments also offer ample invitations to reconnect.

Disconnections are a fact of life

Researcher Ed Tronick, together with colleague Andrew Gianino, calculated how often infants and caregivers are attuned to each other. (Attunement is a back-and-forth rhythm of interaction where partners share positive emotions.) They found that it’s surprisingly little. Even in healthy, securely attached relationships, caregivers and babies are in sync only 30% of the time. The other 70%, they’re mismatched, out of synch, or making repairs and coming back together. Cheeringly, even babies work toward repairs with their gazes, smiles, gestures, protests, and calls.

These mismatches and repairs are critical, Tronick explains. They’re important for growing children’s self-regulation, coping, and resilience. It is through these mismatches—in small, manageable doses—that babies, and later children, learn that the world does not track them perfectly. These small exposures to the micro-stress of unpleasant feelings, followed by the pleasant feelings that accompany repair, or coming back together, are what give them manageable practice in keeping their boat afloat when the waters are choppy. Put another way, if a caregiver met all of their child’s needs perfectly, it would actually get in the way of the child’s development.   “Repairing ruptures is the most essential thing in parenting,” says UCLA neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel , director of the Mindsight Institute and author of several books on interpersonal neurobiology.

Life is a series of mismatches, miscommunications, and misattunements that are quickly repaired, says Tronick , and then again become miscoordinated and stressful, and again are repaired. This occurs thousands of times in a day, and millions of times over a year.

Greater Good in Spanish

Read this article in Spanish on La Red Hispana, the public-facing media outlet and distribution house of HCN , focused on educating, inspiring, and informing 40 million U.S. Hispanics.

Other research shows that children have more conflicts and repairs with friends than non-friends. Sibling conflict is legendary; and adults’ conflicts escalate when they become parents. If interpersonal conflict is unavoidable—and even necessary—then the only way we can maintain important relationships is to get better at re-synchronizing them, and especially at tending to repairs when they rupture.

“Relationships shrink to the size of the field of repair,” says Rick Hanson , psychologist and author of several books on the neuroscience of well-being. “But a bid for a repair is one of the sweetest and most vulnerable and important kinds of communication that humans offer to each other,” he adds. “It says you value the relationship.”

Strengthening the family fabric

In a small Canadian study , researchers examined how parents of four- to seven-year-old children strengthened, harmed, or repaired their relationships with their children. Parents said their relationships with their children were strengthened by “horizontal” or egalitarian exchanges like playing together, negotiating, taking turns, compromising, having fun, or sharing psychological intimacy—in other words, respecting and enjoying one another. Their relationships were harmed by an over-reliance on power and authority, and especially by stonewalling tactics like the “silent treatment.” When missteps happened, parents repaired and restored intimacy by expressing warmth and affection, talking about what happened, and apologizing.

This model of strengthening, harming, and repairing can help you think about your own interactions. When a family relationship is already positive, there is a foundation of trust and a belief in the other’s good intentions, which helps everyone restore more easily from minor ruptures. For this reason, it helps to proactively tend the fabric of family relationships.   That can begin with simply building up an investment of positive interactions:

Spend “special time” with each child individually to create more space to deepen your one-to-one relationship. Let them control the agenda and decide how long you spend together.
Appreciate out loud, share gratitude reflections, and notice the good in your children intermittently throughout the day or week.

You also want to watch out for ways you might harm the relationship. If you’re ever unsure about a child’s motives, check their intentions behind their behaviors and don’t assume they were ill-intentioned. Language like, “I noticed that…” or “Tell me what happened…” or “And then what happened?” can help you begin to understand an experience from the child’s point of view.

A Loving Space for Kids’ Emotions

Show love to your children by helping them process emotions

When speaking to a child, consider how they might receive what you’re saying. Remember that words and silence have weight; children are “ emotional Geiger counters ” and read your feelings much more than they process your words. If you are working through feelings or traumas that have nothing to do with them, take care to be responsible for your own feelings and take a moment to calm yourself before speaking.

In this context of connection and understanding, you can then create a family culture where rifts are expected and repairs are welcomed:

Watch for tiny bids for repairs . Sometimes we have so much on our minds that we miss the look, gesture, or expression in a child that shows that what they really want is to reconnect.
Normalize requests like “I need a repair” or “Can we have a redo?” We need to be able to let others know when the relationship has been harmed.
Likewise, if you think you might have stepped on someone’s toes, circle back to check. Catching a misstep early can help.

When you’re annoyed by a family member’s behavior, try to frame your request for change in positive language; that is, say what you want them to do rather than what you don’t. Language like, “I have a request…” or “Would you be willing to…?” keeps the exchange more neutral and helps the recipient stay engaged rather than getting defensive.

You can also model healthy repairs with people around you, so they are normalized and children see their usefulness in real time. Children benefit when they watch adults resolve conflict constructively. 

Four steps to an authentic repair

There are infinite varieties of repairs, and they can vary in a number of ways, depending on your child’s age and temperament, and how serious the rift was.

Infants need physical contact and the restoration of love and security. Older children need affection and more words. Teenagers may need more complex conversations. Individual children vary in their styles—some need more words than others, and what is hurtful to one child may not faze another child. Also, your style might not match the child’s, requiring you to stretch further.

Some glitches are little and may just need a check-in, but deeper wounds need more attention. Keep the apology in proportion to the hurt. What’s important is not your judgment of how hurt someone should be, but the actual felt experience of the child’s hurt. A one-time apology may suffice, but some repairs need to be acknowledged frequently over time to really stitch that fabric back together. It’s often helpful to check in later to see if the amends are working.

While each repair is unique, authentic repairs typically involve the same steps.

1. Acknowledge the offense. First, try to understand the hurt you caused. It doesn’t matter if it was unintentional or what your reasons were. This is the time to turn off your own defense system and focus on understanding and naming the other person’s pain or anger.

Sometimes you need to check your understanding. Begin slowly: “Did I hurt you? Help me understand how.” This can be humbling and requires that we listen with an open heart as we take in the other person’s perspective.

Try not to undermine the apology by adding on any caveats, like blaming the child for being sensitive or ill-behaved or deserving of what happened. Any attempt to gloss over, minimize, or dilute the wound is not an authentic repair. Children have a keen sense for authenticity. Faking it or overwhelming them will not work.

A spiritual teacher reminded me of an old saying, “It is acknowledging the wound that gets the thorn out.” It’s what reconnects our humanity.

Making an Effective Apology

A good apology involves more than saying "sorry"

2. Express remorse. Here, a sincere “I’m sorry” is sufficient.

Don’t add anything to it. One of the mistakes adults often make, according to therapist and author Harriet Lerner , is to tack on a discipline component: “Don’t let it happen again,” or “Next time, you’re really going to get it.” This, says Lerner, is what prevents children from learning to use apologies themselves.   Apologizing can be tricky for adults. It might feel beneath us, or we may fear that we’re giving away our power. We shouldn’t have to apologize to a child, because as adults we are always right, right? Of course not. But it’s easy to get stuck in a vertical power relationship to our child that makes backtracking hard.

On the other hand, some adults—especially women, says Rick Hanson —can go overboard and be too effusive, too obsequious, or even too quick in their efforts to apologize. This can make the apology more about yourself than the person who was hurt. Or it could be a symptom of a need for one’s own boundary work.

There is no perfect formula for an apology except that it be delivered in a way that acknowledges the wound and makes amends. And there can be different paths to that. Our family sometimes uses a jokey, “You were right, I was wrong, you were right, I was wrong, you were right, I was wrong,” to playfully acknowledge light transgressions. Some apologies are nonverbal: My father atoned for missing all of my childhood birthdays when he traveled 2,000 miles to surprise me at my doorstep for an adult birthday. Words are not his strong suit, but his planning, effort, and showing up was the repair. Apologies can take on all kinds of tones and qualities.

3. Consider offering a brief explanation. If you sense that the other person is open to listening, you can provide a brief explanation of your point of view, but use caution, as this can be a slippery slope. Feel into how much is enough. The focus of the apology is on the wounded person’s experience. If an explanation helps, fine, but it shouldn’t derail the intent. This is not the time to add in your own grievances—that’s a conversation for a different time.

4. Express your sincere intention to fix the situation and to prevent it from happening again. With a child, especially, try to be concrete and actionable about how the same mistake can be prevented in the future. “I’m going to try really hard to…” and “Let’s check back in to see how it’s feeling…” can be a start.

Remember to forgive yourself, too. This is a tender process, we are all works in progress, and adults are still developing. I know I am.

Prior to our visit, my daughter and I had a phone conversation. We shared our excitement about the rare chance to spend so much time together. Then we gingerly expressed our concerns.

“I’m afraid we’ll get on each other’s nerves,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’ll be cooking and cleaning the whole time,” she replied.

So we strategized about preventing these foibles. She made a spreadsheet of chores where everyone signed up for a turn cooking and cleaning, and we discussed the space needs that people would have for working and making phone calls.

Then I drew a breath and took a page from the science. “I think we have to expect that conflicts are going to happen,” I said. “It’s how we work through them that will matter. The love is in the repair.”

This article is excerpted from a longer article on Diana Divecha’s blog, developmentalscience.com.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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What are dysfunctional family relationships?

Common causes of family conflict, tips on interacting with difficult family members, when to cut ties with family members, dealing with difficult family relationships.

Struggling to coexist with difficult family members? Learn about common sources of conflict and how to deal with dysfunctional family relationships.

Mothers, fathers, siblings—your closest family members can form a lifelong social support system. They can celebrate your highs and give you comfort when you’re at your lows. Even so, disagreements and misunderstandings are bound to happen. Minor conflicts between family members are normal, and they typically resolve on their own or with some constructive dialogue. But other conflicts can be much more significant. In cases where resentment and toxic patterns arise, family interactions can become lasting sources of frustration and tear relationships apart.

Difficult family relationships can take on many forms. You might have an overly critical dad who makes you feel anxious. Perhaps a sibling’s jealousy is a constant source of tension at family functions. Or maybe you believe a new in-law’s controlling behavior leads to unnecessary drama.

These turbulent family relationships can have long-lasting effects on your health and well-being. You might:

Begin to blame yourself for these poor relationships.
Experience fear and anxiety surrounding family or holiday events.
Hesitate to reach out to other family members.
Suffer from lack of emotional or financial support during hard times.
Develop trouble sleeping or focusing due to the stress of these interactions.

Research even indicates that poor relationships with parents, siblings, or spouses can contribute to midlife depression symptoms . Exposure to domestic conflicts can also have a long-term impact on a child’s well-being as well. One longitudinal study found that domestic arguments and violence can increase a child’s risk of developing mental and physical health problems later in life.

To minimize these consequences, you can learn how to identify causes of family tension and take steps to create peaceful interactions. While you might eventually find that cutting ties is the best option for your health and happiness, there are approaches you can take that can help repair family bonds and improve your relationships with those closest to you.

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Before you learn how to deal with difficult family members, it helps to examine why those relationships are rocky to begin with. Consider these common causes of family disputes and ways to navigate them:

Family finances

Family members tend to have some degree of financial overlap. Siblings might bicker over an inheritance. Parents may have strong opinions on how their children handle money. Or adult children might feel the need to control their aging parents’ finances.

When it comes to large family events, such as weddings or holiday parties, financial disagreements can often come to a head. However, there are ways to navigate money-related problems within your family.

Put things in writing. If you expect a family member to pay you back for a personal loan, for example, make a written agreement between the two of you. This can help you avoid arguments or even legal disputes.

Set boundaries. If a family member is pressuring you to loan or give them money or wants to dictate your finances, it’s important to clarify the type of behavior you won’t tolerate. Be clear so your family member will know when they’ve crossed the line.

Know when to be transparent. You don’t have to share all of your financial details with anyone. But, in cases where your decisions may affect your family members, it’s best to be transparent. You might want to talk to your children about details of their inheritance to avoid a future conflict, for example, or let your siblings know why you can’t contribute to a shared expense.

[Read: Coping with Financial Stress]

Caregiving responsibilities

Research from 2020 shows that about 19 percent of Americans are acting as unpaid family caregivers. The stresses and responsibilities of being a caregiver can weigh heavily on family relationships.

Studies indicate that tension between siblings tends to increase when a parent begins to need some level of caregiving. Perhaps you believe your sibling is in denial over your parent’s health and needs to be more proactive. Or maybe you and your sibling disagree on whether an assisted living facility is the right housing choice for your parent.

Conflicts over caregiving aren’t limited to sibling relationships. You might have arguments with your parents or spouse over how to raise your children.

When you and another family member are at odds over caregiving, try these tips:

Be open about what level of support you need as a caregiver. If you keep your feelings to yourself, resentment can grow and increase tensions.

Look for compromise and accept other people’s limitations. If your sibling can’t physically assist with caregiving, perhaps they can offer financial help. Remember to show your appreciation when your sibling takes on responsibilities.

If someone else is completely unable or unwilling to help with parental caregiving, try looking for support outside of your family .

[Read: Family Caregiving]

New family members

As your family expands, so does the potential for new conflicts. In one study of estrangement between mothers and adult children, more than 70 percent of the mothers said other family members caused the rift. The mothers often pointed to the child’s partner or spouse as the problem.

These conflicts aren’t limited to mothers and children, of course. You and your brother-in-law might have a contentious relationship. Or perhaps your father-in-law always seems to expect too much from you. To better get along with your in-laws:

Expect differences. Different families have different expectations, boundaries, and ways of doing things. Do you see your daughter-in-law as an untactful or even rude family member? Maybe she comes from a family background that encourages blunt language or tolerates teasing.

Focus on their most positive traits. Your in-laws are part of your family because someone else in your family saw the good in them. If you’re having a hard time seeing past their flaws, try making a list of their strengths.

Find common interests. Although it’s not always easy, you can usually find shared interests if you look hard enough. Ask about your in-laws’ hobbies, passions, and past experiences until you find something that’s relatable.

Political and religious differences

Religious and political similarities can affect the strength of family bonds. For example, studies indicate that when mothers share the same religion as adult children, they tend to experience higher-quality relationships.

On the other hand, when family members don’t have the same views on religion or politics, it can trigger heated arguments. Maybe your sibling objects to group prayers before meals. Or perhaps you hear insults and snide remarks when you express your political views. Here’s how to deal with difficult family members who have opposing views:

Identify useful conversations. When a debate starts, ask yourself what you hope to get from the interaction. Do you expect to completely change your family member’s mind? Or are you trying to gain insight into their beliefs? Is it at all possible that either of you will budge on your position? Even if you’ll never agree about something, you can still move the conversation forward if you’re both willing to be open and respectful of each other’s views.

Avoid sweeping generalizations. Statements like, “Everyone on the left is evil” or “Everyone on the right is an idiot” can quickly escalate arguments and further entrench people.

Try to see the human element in the other person’s values. Many political beliefs are shaped by an underlying concern for society, such as economic or environmental stability. By recognizing that, the other person’s views may not seem as wildly different from your own.

Know when to exit heated arguments. When emotions run too hot, make a respectful but firm exit from the conversation. You can say something like, “I’m not sure if this is productive. Let’s leave it there.” Contain the urge to have the “last word.”

Be mindful of your jokes. Humor can often help diffuse a tense argument . However, avoid aggressive jokes that target the other person’s beliefs or values.

Unresolved family issues

Things that happened in the past can have a lasting effect on family relationships. Did you and your son have an explosive argument when he was a teenager? If the matter went unresolved, he might continue to be resentful or distrustful of you. Did your parents seem to favor you over your brothers? Jealousy could become an underlying source of tension for your siblings.

Unresolved issues can often crop up during milestone events or times of change within the family. For example, insecurities over parental favoritism might reappear as you and your siblings begin to act as caregivers to an aging parent.

If you’re the one holding onto an issue, speak up. Invite the other person to a private conversation, where you can bring up the issue and share your perspective. Be willing to forgive if the party apologizes for their part in the problem.

If a family member is holding resentment, be empathetic. Try to understand how they perceived events and how the past continues to affect them. If you caused some harm to them in the past, apologize and ask how you can repair the damage to the relationship. For example, if you lost your temper with your son in the past, explain how you plan to do better going forward.

If neither person is at fault, it can still help to acknowledge the past and the effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family. Remember that no family is perfect, and past events influence present-day perceptions. Focus on what steps you can take in the present to resolve the conflict .

Despite your best efforts and intentions, sometimes you’ll find that you simply can’t get along with a family member. Perhaps someone continues to hold a grudge against you or refuses to change their behavior.

Your general plan might be to avoid difficult family members. However, that strategy can often be foiled by weddings, funerals, and other family gatherings. Here are some alternate options:

Manage your own stress

Prioritize de-stressing before and after you have to interact with a difficult family member. Effective stress management techniques can range from meditation to going for a walk to journaling your thoughts or chatting face-to-face with a close friend.

If you start to feel stressed by the difficult family member during the event itself, don’t hesitate to excuse yourself from the room and use some quick stress relief techniques to clear your head.

Rely on your senses to ground yourself in the moment. Take in a deep breath of fresh air, find a friendly cat or dog to pet, or hum a tune to yourself. You can also use your imagination to picture something soothing, like your child’s face or a relaxing setting.
If you tend to freeze when under stress, activities that involve physical movement are often most effective. Consider doing some stretches, swaying to background music, or jogging in place to burn off tension.

Set and maintain boundaries

Strong, clear boundaries can protect you from toxic family interactions. Imagine you and your spouse are about to visit overbearing in-laws. Talk to your spouse and set a limit on how long the visit will last. You can also set boundaries on conversation topics. If you and your in-laws have had heated arguments over religion, it might be best to steer clear of the topic.

If someone attempts to cross your boundaries, keep your temper in check. Instead, be clear and direct about the consequence. For example, you could say something like: “If you keep bringing up that topic, I’ll be leaving early.”

Build your emotional intelligence (EQ)

By strengthening your emotional intelligence, you can improve your ability to understand, manage, and express emotions. This can have a positive effect not just on your family relationships but on your overall mental health.

To enhance your EQ, you need to focus on four key skills:

Self-management
Self-awareness
Social awareness
Relationship management

You can develop these skills by taking steps such as using mindfulness to assess your emotional state and nonverbal cues. Read Improving Family Relationships with Emotional Intelligence for more strategies.

Change your focus

Be willing to acknowledge your family member’s strengths as well as their flaws. Perhaps your sibling is confrontational and demanding, but at least they’re always willing to help finance family events. Or maybe your mother-in-law is overly critical of you but always supportive of your children.

Practice empathy

Acknowledge that a difficult family member might be going through rough circumstances of their own. From personal insecurities to substance addiction or mental illness, certain underlying factors could be fueling your family member’s behavior.

Although these factors don’t excuse the behavior, by being more empathetic you might gain a better understanding of the person and why they act the way they do.

Use conflict resolution skills

Conflict resolution skills can come in handy anytime you’re dealing with family drama. These skills involve managing stress in the moment , being aware of both your own emotions and the other person’s, and prioritizing resolution over winning the argument.

You might notice that an aging parent is lashing out due to a feeling of declining independence. A deescalating step might be to ask them to do you a favor or give them a task that allows them to feel needed.

[Read: Conflict Resolution Skills]

Limit expectations and practice acceptance

Make peace with the fact that some people have viewpoints or priorities that may never match your own. Your adult children, siblings, or parents will do what they feel is right for them, and you can’t control their behavior. Try to treasure the relationship for what it is, or focus on other relationships that bring you joy.

At what point is a dysfunctional family relationship no longer worth saving? That may depend on different factors.

What’s the potential for change? The other person must be willing to acknowledge the problem and work to change. Some people don’t want to change, and you can’t control their behavior. If you’re dealing with a narcissistic family member , their inflated self-image, lack of empathy, and manipulative ways can hinder any meaningful progress.

How severe is the conflict? In cases of abuse , it’s usually advisable to cut ties with the family member. Remember that abuse doesn’t necessarily have to be physical. People who subject you to verbal, emotional, or psychological abuse can also harm your sense of well-being. This could include a father-in-law who aims to humiliate you or siblings who use guilt-tripping to manipulate you.

Dealing with doubts

Cutting ties means ending contact with the difficult family member, which is not always easy. You might repeatedly question your decision or have a hard time accepting that the relationship is unsalvageable.

Keep a list of specific reasons why you’ve decided to end contact. Did the person cross your boundaries too many times? Did the stress of your interactions negatively affect other areas of your life? Write it all down, so you don’t forget.

How to deal with the grief of ending a relationship

Depending on how close you were to the family member, you may need to take time to grieve the loss of the relationship.

Rather than suppress your feelings, identify and acknowledge them. It’s normal to experience anything from anger to sadness to guilt following the end of a relationship. You should also expect grief to intensify on days that remind you of the family member, such as birthdays or holidays.

Talk to friends and other family members about the situation. Now is a good time to reach out for support. Tell the supportive people in your life what you need from them. You might even strengthen bonds with other family members.

Maintain your hobbies and health. Continue to engage in activities you love, and look after your physical healthy by exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, and eating nutritious foods. Don’t use drugs or alcohol to cope with your negative feelings .

Moving forward

Over time, people’s behaviors and circumstances can change. So, know that cutting off ties doesn’t necessarily have to be permanent. If you see evidence that your family member is truly willing to make amends, there may be a chance of reconciliation.

Don’t rush reconciliation, though. You should both accept that the process may take time and requires concrete steps for improving the relationship. With a combination of patience and improved communication , you might be able to repair that broken bond and move forward with a healthier relationship.

More Information

Help with Relationships - Articles addressing common relationship problems, such as arguments, conflict, and communication. (Relate UK)
Buist, K. L., van Tergouw, M. S., Koot, H. M., & Branje, S. (2019). Longitudinal Linkages between Older and Younger Sibling Depressive Symptoms and Perceived Sibling Relationship Quality. Journal of Youth and Adolescence , 48(6), 1190–1202. Link
Con, G., Suitor, J. J., Rurka, M., & Gilligan, M. (2019). Adult Children’s Perceptions of Maternal Favoritism During Caregiving: Comparisons Between Turkey and the United States. Research on Aging , 41(2), 139–163. Link
Full-report-caregiving-in-the-united-states-01-21.pdf. (n.d.). Retrieved January 12, 2022, from Link
Gilligan, M., Suitor, J., Nam, S., Routh, B., Rurka, M., & Con, G. (2017). Family Networks and Psychological Well-Being in Midlife. Social Sciences , 6(3), 94. Link
Paradis, A. D., Reinherz, H. Z., Giaconia, R. M., Beardslee, W. R., Ward, K., & Fitzmaurice, G. M. (2009). Long-Term Impact of Family Arguments and Physical Violence on Adult Functioning at Age 30 Years: Findings From the Simmons Longitudinal Study. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry , 48(3), 290–298. Link
Schoppe-Sullivan, S. J., Coleman, J., Wang, J., & Yan, J. J. (2021). Mothers’ attributions for estrangement from their adult children. Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice . Link
Sechrist, J., Suitor, J. J., Vargas, N., & Pillemer, K. (2011). The Role of Perceived Religious Similarity in the Quality of Mother-child Relations in Later Life: Differences Within Families and Between Races. Research on Aging , 33(1), 3–27. Link
Suitor, J. J., Gilligan, M., Johnson, K., & Pillemer, K. (2014). Caregiving, Perceptions of Maternal Favoritism, and Tension Among Siblings. The Gerontologist , 54(4), 580–588. Link
Waldinger, R. J., Vaillant, G. E., & Orav, E. J. (2007). Childhood Sibling Relationships as a Predictor of Major Depression in Adulthood: A 30-Year Prospective Study. American Journal of Psychiatry , 164(6), 949–954. Link

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The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting

R aising children has become significantly more time-consuming and expensive, amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.

By Claire Cain Miller

Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

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The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s.

Renée Sentilles enrolled her son Isaac in lessons beginning when he was an infant. Even now that he’s 12, she rarely has him out of sight when he is home.

“I read all the child-care books,” said Ms. Sentilles, a professor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.

There are signs of a backlash, led by so-called free-range parents, but social scientists say the relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety. For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into .

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies families and inequality . “The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

But it also stokes economic anxiety, because even as more parents say they want to raise children this way, it’s the richest ones who are most able to do so.

“Intensive parenting is a way for especially affluent white mothers to make sure their children are maintaining their advantaged position in society,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University and author of “Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.”

Stacey Jones raised her two sons, now in their 20s, as a single mother in a working-class, mostly black neighborhood in Stone Mountain, Ga. She said she and other parents tried hard to give their children opportunities by finding affordable options: municipal sports leagues instead of traveling club teams and school band instead of private music lessons.

“I think most people have this craving for their children to do better and know more than they do,” said Ms. Jones, who works in university communications. “But a lot of these opportunities were closed off because they do cost money.”

‘Child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing’

“Parent” as a verb gained widespread use in the 1970s, which is also when parenting books exploded. The 1980s brought helicopter parenting, a movement to keep children safe from physical harm, spurred by high-profile child assaults and abductions (despite the fact that they were, and are, exceedingly rare ). Intensive parenting was first described in the 1990s and 2000s by social scientists including Sharon Hays and Annette Lareau . It grew from a major shift in how people saw children. They began to be considered vulnerable and moldable — shaped by their early childhood experiences — an idea bolstered by advances in child development research.

The result was a parenting style that was “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive,” Ms. Hays wrote in her 1998 book , “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.” And mothers were the ones expected to be doing the constant cultivation.

The time parents spend in the presence of their children has not changed much, but parents today spend more of it doing hands-on child care. Time spent on activities like reading to children; doing crafts; taking them to lessons; attending recitals and games; and helping with homework has increased the most. Today, mothers spend nearly five hours a week on that, compared with 1 hour 45 minutes hours in 1975 — and they worry it’s not enough. Parents’ leisure time , like exercising or socializing, is much more likely to be spent with their children than it used to be. While fathers have recently increased their time spent with children, mothers still spend significantly more .

Ms. Sentilles’s mother, Claire Tassin, described a very different way of parenting when her two children were young, in the 1970s. “My job was not to entertain them,” said Ms. Tassin, who lives in Vacherie, La. “My job was to love them and discipline them.”

Of her grandchildren, Isaac and his three cousins, she said: “Their life is much more enriched than mine was, but it definitely has been directed. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. They’re amazing. But I know I felt free, so free as a child. I put on my jeans and my cowboy boots and I played outside all day long.”

“My job was not to entertain them. My job was to love them and discipline them.”

Claire Tassin, 75

“There’s this sense that something is wrong with you if you aren’t with your children every second when you’re not at work.”

Renée Sentilles, 52

The new trappings of intensive parenting are largely fixtures of white, upper-middle-class American culture, but researchers say the expectations have permeated all corners of society, whether or not parents can achieve them. It starts in utero , when mothers are told to avoid cold cuts and coffee, lest they harm the baby. Then: video baby monitors. Homemade baby food. Sugar-free birthday cake. Toddler music classes. Breast-feeding exclusively. Spraying children’s hands with sanitizer and covering them in “natural” sunscreen. Throwing Pinterest-perfect birthday parties. Eating lunch in their children’s school cafeterias. Calling employers after their adult children interview for jobs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics promotes the idea that parents should be constantly monitoring and teaching children, even when the science doesn’t give a clear answer about what’s best. It now recommends that babies sleep in parents’ rooms for a year . Children’s television — instead of giving parents the chance to cook dinner or have an adult conversation — is to be “ co-viewed ” for maximum learning.

An American phenomenon

At the same time, there has been little increase in support for working parents, like paid parental leave, subsidized child care or flexible schedules, and there are fewer informal neighborhood networks of at-home parents because more mothers are working.

Ms. Sentilles felt the lack of support when it became clear that Isaac had some challenges like anxiety and trouble sleeping. She and her ex-husband changed their work hours and coordinated tutors and therapists.

“Friends are constantly texting support, but no one has time,” she said. “It’s that we’re all doing this at the same time.”

Parenthood is more hands-off in many other countries. In Tokyo, children start riding the subway alone by first grade, and in Paris, they spend afternoons unaccompanied at playgrounds. Intensive parenting has gained popularity in England and Australia, but it has distinctly American roots — reflecting a view of child rearing as an individual, not societal, task.

It’s about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis whose book , “Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving,” comes out in February. “It distracts from the real questions, like why don’t we have a safe place for all kids to go when they’re done with school before parents get home from work?”

In a new paper , Patrick Ishizuka surveyed a nationally representative group of 3,642 parents about parenting. Regardless of their education, income or race, they said the most hands-on and expensive choices were best. For example, they said children who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked.

“Intensive parenting has really become the dominant cultural model for how children should be raised,” said Mr. Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow studying gender and inequality at Cornell.

Americans are having fewer children , so they have more time and money to invest in each one. But investment gaps between parents of differing incomes were not always so large. As a college degree became increasingly necessary to earn a middle-class wage and as admissions grew more competitive, parents began spending significantly more time on child care, found Valerie Ramey and Garey Ramey, economists at the University of California, San Diego.

Parents also began spending more money on their children for things like preschools and enrichment activities, Sabino Kornrich, a sociologist at Emory, showed in two recent papers . Rich parents have more to spend, but the share of income that poor parents spend on their children has also grown.

In states with the largest gaps between the rich and the poor, rich parents spend an even larger share of their incomes on things like lessons and private school, found Danny Schneider , a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues in a May paper . Parents in the middle 50 percent of incomes have also increased their spending. “Lower socioeconomic status parents haven’t been able to keep up,” he said.

Besides having less money, they have less access to the informal conversations in which parents exchange information with other parents like them. Ms. Jones recalled that one of her sons liked swimming, but it wasn’t until he was in high school that she learned about swim teams on which he could have competed.

“I didn’t know because I don’t live in a swim tennis community,” she said. “Unfortunately colleges and universities tend to look at these things as a marker of achievement, and I feel like a lot of kids who have working-class backgrounds don’t benefit from the knowledge.”

Race influences parents’ concerns , too. Ms. Jones said that as a parent of black boys, she decided to raise them in a mostly black neighborhood so they would face less racism, even though it meant driving farther to many activities.

This is common for middle-class black mothers, found Dawn Dow, a sociologist at the University of Maryland whose book , “Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood,” comes out in February. “They’re making decisions to protect their kids from early experiences of racism,” Ms. Dow said. “It’s a different host of concerns that are equally intensive.”

The growing backlash

Experts agree that investing in children is a positive thing — they benefit from time with their parents, stimulating activities and supportive parenting styles. As low-income parents have increased the time they spend teaching and reading to their children, the readiness gap between kindergarten students from rich and poor families has shrunk . As parental supervision has increased, most serious crimes against children have declined significantly .

But it’s also unclear how much of children’s success is actually determined by parenting.

“It’s still an open question whether it’s the parenting practices themselves that are making the difference, or is it simply growing up with college-educated parents in an environment that’s richer in many dimensions?” said Liana Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and director of the Time Use Laboratory there. “I don’t think any of these studies so far have been able to answer whether these kids would be doing well as adults regardless, simply because of resources.”

There has been a growing movement against the relentlessness of modern-day parenting. Utah passed a free-range parenting law , exempting parents from accusations of neglect if they let their children play or commute unattended.

Psychologists and others have raised alarms about children’s high levels of stress and dependence on their parents, and the need to develop independence, self-reliance and grit . Research has shown that children with hyper-involved parents have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life, and that when children play unsupervised, they build social skills, emotional maturity and executive function .

Parents, particularly mothers, feel stress , exhaustion and guilt at the demands of parenting this way, especially while holding a job. American time use diaries show that the time women spend parenting comes at the expense of sleep, time alone with their partners and friends, leisure time and housework. Some pause their careers or choose not to have children . Others, like Ms. Sentilles, live in a state of anxiety. She doesn’t want to hover, she said. But trying to oversee homework, limit screen time and attend to Isaac’s needs, she feels no choice.

“At any given moment, everything could just fall apart,” she said.

“On the one hand, I love my work,” she said. “But the way it’s structured in this country, where there’s not really child care and there’s this sense that something is wrong with you if you aren’t with your children every second when you’re not at work? It isn’t what I think feminists thought they were signing up for.”

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

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Adolescence

Adolescence and the problem of parental expectations., unrealistic parental expectations about adolescence can cause emotional harm..

Posted March 23, 2010

Most parents, particularly of a first or only child, or a second child if the first has been particularly "easy," are unprepared for that child's adolescence , if they think about the normal abrasive changes of adolescence at all, they often assume these unwelcome alterations will happen to other people's children, but not to their own. However, denial is not a good coping strategy. In fact, denial is the enemy in hiding, parents refusing to prepare for the changing reality that comes with adolescence when their son or daughter lets it be known that he or she is no longer be content to be defined and treated any longer as a just a child.

Better for parents to develop a realistic set of expectations about the "hard half of parenting " (adolescence). A basic expectation to begin with has to do with duration. Today's parents can generally assume that adolescence will commence around ages 9 - 13 in late elementary or early middle school and not to wind down until the early or mid 20's. Must it last this many years? In most cases, yes. What with the increasing complexity of society, the rate of technological and social evolution, and all the knowledge and skills required to master young adult independence, adolescence takes a long time.

So why are expectations psychologically important? Think of them this way. Expectations are mental sets we choose to hold (they are not genetically endowed) that help us move through time (from now to later), through change (from old to new), and through experience (from familiar to unfamiliar) in order to anticipate the next reality we encounter.

To appreciate the power of expectations consider those challenges, circumstances, or relationships where we have no idea what to expect. Now ignorance tends to beget feelings of anxiety . "I've not faced a situation like this before!" "I have no idea what the results will be!" "I never know what she is going to do next!"

This is why a parent has a preparatory responsibility for children who are faced with some major life change. The parent needs to help them build realistic expectations about what the new experience will be like - going off to a new school, adjusting to parental divorce , getting ready for a medical procedure, for example.

Expectations can ease our way through life when they roughly fit the next reality we encounter. They can facilitate our capacity to adjust to the new and different. Although we may not like the reality we anticipate, at least expectations can help us get prepared.

Unprepared, we can be blind-sided by what occurs. This is what can happen when parents expect an adolescent to behave the same as he or she did as a child. For example, consider three different kinds of expectation parents can hold: predictions, ambitions, and conditions, and what happens when they are violated.

Predictions have to do with what parents believe WILL happen. "My adolescent will be as openly confiding with me as she was as a child." But come adolescence, many young people tend to become more private and less disclosing to parents for independence sake. Now, when their prediction is violated, parents can feel surprised and anxious in response to the diminishing amount of comunication.

Ambitions have to do with what parents WANT to have happen in adolescence. "We want him to continue to be as academically motivated and conscientious as when he was a child. But come adolescence, many young people suffer an "early adolescent achievement drop" (see 3/15/09 blog) and school performance and homework suffer for resistance sake. Now when their ambition is violated, parents can feel disappointed and let down in response to the faltering motivation .

Conditions have to do with what parents believe SHOULD happen in adolescence. "She should continue to keep us adequately and accurately informed about what is going on in her life." But come adolescence, many young people become more deceptive with parents, sometimes lying about what is going on for illicit freedom's sake. Now when their condition is violated, parents feel betrayed and angry in response to more dishonesty."

Mental sets can have emotional consequences for parents when a young person violates their expectations. Then, feeling surprised, disappointed, or betrayed by a normal adolescent change, parents can overreact with worry, grief , or anger thereby "emotionalizing" a situation and making it harder to effectively resolve. This doesn't mean parents should just accept it when a young person cuts off communication, stops doing schoolwork, and acts dishonestly. EXPECT DOES NOT MEAN ACCEPT.

Parents must address these new behaviors to let the young person know that they still need to be adequately informed, that performance effort at school still must be maintained, and that truthful communication still must be told. But if these parents had anticipated the likelihood of these changes, a rational discussion and not an emotional encounter would have ensued.

The reason I write this blog is to help parents create realistic expectations about the journey of their child's adolescence. Parents who are adequately informed about some of the normal changes, tensions, conflicts and problems that typically unfold during adolescence are best positioned to cope with these challenges in appropriate ways because they expected these issues and alterations might arise.

But managing expectations for their adolescent's conduct is more complicated than this because there are two sets of expectations for parents to manage - EXPECTATIONS OF ACCEPTANCE to build trust and EXPECTATIONS OF CHANGE to influence direction.

Expectations of acceptance essentially communicate: "you will do what you can, you are how I want, and you should be as you are." Thinks the adolescent: "You love me as I am."

Expectations of change essentially communicate: "you will need to alter your conduct, you are not acting how I want, and you should behave differently." Thinks the adolescent: "You guide me as you think best."

The rule of parenting priorities is to set expectations of acceptance before introducing expectations of change. When parents demand change before establishing acceptance, they encourage resistance because change sends a message of rejection: "you are not okay the way you are." And when parents make acceptance conditional on change, they can really alienate the adolescent. "I will only stop criticizing your conduct when your attitude improves!"

Finally, parents must develop realistic expectations about how the relationship changes when a child becomes adolescent, or else suffer unhappy emotional consequences when they do not.

The parent who predicts the adolescent will continue to prize parental company more than any other is rudely awakened when the young person now prefers spending time with peers instead of time with parents. This parent can not make peace with this loss of companionship.

The parent whose ambition is to enjoy the same interests with the adolescent that were shared with the child is rudely awakened when differentiation from childhood and parents causes that similarity to be lost. This parent cannot make peace with this loss of commonality.

The parent whose condition is that the adolescent should continue to look up to and want to please the parent as in childhood is in rudely awakened when the young person becomes less considerate and more critical. This parent cannot make peace with this loss of approval.

These parents can certainly choose to maintain these unrealistic expectations, but they will do so at an emotional cost -- feeling abandoned, rejected, and disparaged. I believe it is better for these parents to adjust their expectations to fit the new adolescent reality and not protest normal developmental alterations they cannot change.

If parents can keep their expectations about adolescence realistic, then they reduce the likelihood of overreacting when times get hard. And this includes not unduly pressuring the adolescent by pushing unrealistic expectations for performance and conduct (all A's and no mistakes), criticizing anything less than perfection as a relative failure.

Next week's entry: Yelling at your adolescent.

Carl Pickhardt Ph.D. is a psychologist in private counseling and public lecturing practice in Austin, Texas. His latest book is Holding On While Letting Go: Parenting Your Child Through the Four Freedoms of Adolescence.

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Family Conflict Resolution: 6 Worksheets & Scenarios (+ PDF)

It is perhaps unrealistic to expect that relationships remain harmonious all the time; occasional disconnections and disagreements are a fact of life that can help a family grow and move forward, accommodating change (Divecha, 2020).

Repeating patterns of conflict, however, can be damaging for family members, especially children, negatively affecting mental and physical wellbeing (Sori, Hecker, & Bachenberg, 2016).

This article explores how to resolve conflict in family relationships and introduces strategies and activities that can help.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free . These science-based tools will help you and those you work with build better social skills and better connect with others.

This Article Contains:

How to resolve conflict in family relationships, 2 examples of conflict scenarios, 3 strategies for family counseling sessions, 6 activities and worksheets to try, a note on conflict resolution for kids, 3 best games and activities for kids, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

“Families typically develop certain basic structural characteristics and interactive patterns that they utilize to respond to internal and external stressors.”

Goldenberg, 2017, p. 4

Built on shared assumptions and narratives that exist within the family structure, family members support the group as it adapts and copes with shifting environments and life events.

Such structures, at times, may support and even promote conflict that occurs within families. Indeed, rifts, clashes, and disagreements within the family can take many forms, including physical, verbal, financial, psychological, and sexual (Marta & Alfieri, 2014).

Therapy has the potential to help a family understand how it organizes itself and maintains cohesion, while improving how it communicates and overcomes problems that lead to conflict (Goldenberg, 2017).

As psychologist Rick Hanson writes, “a bid for repair is one of the sweetest and most vulnerable and important kinds of communication that humans offer to each other” (cited in Divecha, 2020).

Crucially, families can learn to navigate the inevitable tension and disconnection that arise from falling out of sync with one another (Divecha, 2020).

Repairing ruptures resulting from miscommunication, mismatches, and failing to attune to one another is vital for parenting and maintaining family union. But how?

While there are many ways to recover from and resolve conflict, the following four steps are invaluable for authentic repair (modified from Divecha, 2020):

Acknowledge the offense Try to identify and understand the hurt you’ve caused. Whether intended and with apparent good reason or not, this is a valuable opportunity to dial down your defenses and focus on how the other person is feeling.

Acknowledging the hurt without adding caveats is a powerful way to show humanity.

It can help to check your understanding, “Did I upset you? Help me understand how.” Your approach must be open and authentic; unless heartfelt, it risks escalating emotions.

Express remorse Sometimes, simply saying, “I’m sorry,” is enough, or at least an excellent place to start.

Take care though. Adding a comment, such as, “Well, you shouldn’t have done X,” weakens your expression of remorse, especially when dealing with children. They are learning from what you do – right and wrong.

Also, don’t go overboard. Being too quick to say sorry or going over the top with an apology can make it more about yourself than the person hurt.

Offer a simple explanation If the other person is ready to listen (neither too upset nor too angry), a brief explanation can clarify the thinking behind your actions.

Remember to focus on the other person’s experience rather than a litany of excuses for poor behavior. And avoid using this as an opportunity to add grievances or assign blame for issues that have arisen recently.

Learn and practice expressing your intentions to fix the situation and stop it from happening again. Be sincere. Say that you are sorry and mean it.

There is little point in apologizing and recovering from conflict if you intend to repeat the behavior.

Conflict is often avoidable. But if it isn’t, then it is possible to recover and maintain family relationships through authentic activities that repair damage (Divecha, 2020).

Family therapy can help resolve conflicts within the family unit through multiple routes, including:

Exploring various relationships that make up the family.
Bringing couples and families together to resolve interpersonal conflicts rather than treating them separately.
Focusing on interventions with entire families rather than individuals.
Establishing the role of dysfunctional families in individual mental health problems.

Family conflict can appear in all shapes and sizes. While minor disagreements between siblings may be resolved quickly, major rifts can form between child and parent, damaging previously strong bonds.

All relationships within a family can at one time or another descend into conflict. Two such examples include (modified from Goldenberg, 2017):

Conflict over money Bob and Tess are married with two children. In therapy, Tess claims that Bob is mean with his money: checking grocery bills and yelling at the cost of their children’s birthday presents. Along with other relationship issues, conflict had led them to sleep in separate rooms.

Bob argues he works hard for his money and gives her a generous amount each month, but Tess spends beyond their means.

During therapy, it became clear that Bob comes from a working-class family and was taught from an early age to live frugally. His long-standing beliefs underpin (but do not excuse) his outbursts.

In time, therapy helps them become more supportive of one another, giving up their underlying power struggles and successfully moving away from stereotypical gender roles.

Cultural and intergenerational conflict Despite Indira and Sanjay Singh moving to the United States while they were still at preschool age, they have retained the cultural and moral values of their place of birth: India. When their two children were born, they were also taught to be compliant and respect their parents, while friends from school were discouraged.

As the children grew older, it became clear that the conflict between the old and new culture was causing a rift, dividing children and parents. Despite reluctance from the parents, in time, all four attended family therapy and began to deal with cultural differences and expectations arising from multiculturalism.

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Conflict in family situations can be “chronic and unresolved,” cycling through “periods of emotional distance and closeness with intense negative feelings” (Metcalf, 2011, p. 45).

In family therapy, the many theories offer different lenses through which to view the world and, most importantly, help families manage and resolve conflict (Metcalf, 2011).

The following strategies can help protect the family from or cope with conflict in its many forms.

Build an environment of connection and understanding

Divecha (2020) suggests that by building an environment of connection and understanding, you can “create a family culture where rifts are expected and repairs are welcomed.”

Encourage clients to make small but vital changes to the family setting (modified from Divecha, 2020):

Watch out for the easily missed signs that indicate a child, young adult, or partner wishes to find a way to reconnect and recover from conflict.
Normalize requests, such as, “I need a repair” and “Can we have a redo?” that tell us a family member is ready to fix a damaged relationship.
Maintain awareness. If we think we may have caused upset or harm, circle back and check in with the other person.

Building a better environment through frequent repairs can catch problems early and reduce the likelihood of escalation.

Use “I” statements

How we say something can have a significant impact on what others hear. Encourage family members to express how they feel without blaming others, such as (modified from Goldenberg, 2017):

“I am hurt by what you said last night” rather than accusations, such as, “You were out of order last night.”

Speak directly to the therapist

There may be times during a therapy session when tension between family members heightens and the emotional intensity needs to be de-escalated (Goldenberg, 2017).

A helpful communication technique is to ask the family member talking to address the therapist directly. This refocus encourages the speaker to express themselves more calmly and allows the other person time and space to listen and respond under less pressure.

The following activities focus on exploring family structures, beliefs, and problem-solving behavior to avoid or resolve conflict within the group.

Recognizing Family Narratives

Family narratives provide support for coping with upsetting events and recovering from conflict (Goldenberg, 2017).

Use the Recognizing Family Narratives worksheet to identify narratives that explain and justify the structure and interactive patterns that exist within the family.

The constructs we form can enable or inhibit how we cope with conflict and other life events within the family (Goldenberg, 2017).

Parenting With Purpose

Parenting can be difficult; it is easy to lose sight of what is important. Defining meaning and purpose for ourselves as parents and our children can offer a valuable compass for day-to-day decision-making (Hart, 2006).

The Parenting With Purpose worksheet is a helpful reminder of your values and purpose as a parent.

The answers to the questions can help you understand what kind of relationship you would like with your children and why.

What Is Working Within the Family?

While it is essential to identify and fix what is causing conflict within a family, it is equally valuable to recognize what is working.

Once we recognize where we are successful in a relationship, it can remind us that not everything is terrible. We are doing some things right, and we have something upon which we can build.

The What Is Working worksheet helps identify and share the positives in the relationships within the family.

Recognize that conflict doesn’t occur in the family all the time and encourage the activities that unite you as a group.

Meeting Our Family’s Needs

Sura Hart (2006, p. 175), former teacher and education project director for the Center for Nonviolent Communication, says that “you can find conflict in every human story, and in the conflict situation you can find the needs people are wanting to meet.”

Use the Meeting Our Family’s Needs worksheet to help each family member have their needs heard, understood, and, ultimately, accepted.

Consider Your Intentions

Words have the power to share love and anger. Without clear and conscious intention, it is possible to communicate unhelpful and even harmful messages (Hart, 2006).

Use the Consider Your Intentions worksheet to identify and understand your intentions and help you respect and care for other family members’ needs.

Perform an early check on your intentions before you engage with the other family member, especially if it has the potential to turn into conflict.

Using the answers, consider how you can show positive intentions and steer clear of harmful intentions, such as proving yourself right.

Seeing Family Conflict as a Problem to Solve

Conflict isn’t always to be avoided; clashes can be productive, stimulating learning, fostering understanding, and moving a relationship forward (Hart, 2006).

However, some conflict is unnecessary and avoidable, especially regarding daily tasks, such as tidying the house, going to bed, and completing chores.

Use the Seeing Family Conflict as a Problem to Solve worksheet to help recognize everyday actions as problems to overcome rather than points of contention.

14 Effective conflict resolution techniques – BRAINY DOSE

“Life is a series of mismatches, miscommunications, and misattunements that are quickly repaired” says family researcher Ed Tronick (cited in Divecha, 2020).

Children can learn from the family environment that conflict need not be out of proportion to the situation and may, ultimately, lead to positive change.

It helps when family relationships are overwhelmingly positive. Make sure to make “special time” available for each child, where they have control over what you do and for how long, writes Divecha (2020). Learn to show gratitude and appreciation for what the child does more readily without it becoming predictable and unthinking.

Board games such as Monopoly, Checkers, and Life can be played as a pair or a family. The children see that it’s okay to make mistakes and learn from their parents’ reaction to losing.

More physical, active games such as Tag or Hide and Seek allow the whole family to have fun, while, importantly, seeing each other having fun. Children need to experience their parents as humans with a wish to enjoy themselves. Parents benefit from experiencing their family laughing – a reminder that life is not all about duty and rules.

Quieter pastimes, including art and craft, can be a time to build and use mindfulness practices, considering colors, textures, and smells. Interactive activities such as making funny characters out of play dough or houses out of Lego is fun and beyond rules or feelings of failure.

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Family conflict can often be avoided. The following resources help individuals gain a greater understanding of other family members’ needs and feelings.

Mind the Gap Identify and share the values you would like to exist within your family, such as love, trust, compassion, and teamwork.
Conflict at School Conflict outside the home can have an impact inside. Help your children to reflect on the relationships they have at school.

Additional reading and resources include:

Conflict Resolution in Relationships and Couples: 5 Strategies For more ideas on how to resolve conflict in other types of relationships, read our conflict resolution in relationships article.
14 Conflict Resolution Strategies & Techniques for the Workplace This article about conflict resolution in the workplace is a helpful additional read, especially where the lines between family and work is blurred – working in the family business, working from home – these all can cause conflict so be sure to have a look at this article too.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others communicate better, check out this collection of 17 validated positive communication tools for practitioners. Use them to help others improve their communication skills and form deeper and more positive relationships.

It is vital that families learn to survive – and even grow – under adverse conditions. The family unit faces daily challenges from outside and conflict from within that can upset the internal stability that rests upon existing narratives, shared beliefs, and sometimes mistaken assumptions (Goldenberg, 2017).

It can become less about preventing all conflict, which is impossible, and more about creating a family environment that reduces unnecessary friction, repairs rifts and misunderstandings, grows, and moves forward.

Our communication – what we say and how we say it – remains crucial and can improve over time with practice and an improved awareness of one another’s needs. Family members can also learn skills and techniques to improve self-regulation, resilience, and coping that strengthen internal structures.

This article introduces tools and worksheets that help remove avoidable conflict and manage and resolve it within the family unit, where disagreement is inevitable. Try them out with your clients or within your own family to improve engagement, strengthen relationships, and build a more supportive and resilient family structure.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Communication Exercises (PDF) for free .

American Psychological Association. (2011). Family interventions. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://www.apa.org/pi/about/publications/caregivers/practice-settings/intervention/family
Divecha, D. (2020, October 27). Family conflict is normal; it’s the repair that matter s. Greater Good. Retrieved October 4, 2021, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/family_conflict_is_normal_its_the_repair_that_matters
Goldenberg, I. (2017). Family therapy: An overview . Cengage Learning.
Hart, S. (2006). Respectful parents, respectful kids: 7 Keys to turn family conflict into co-operation . PuddleDancer Press.
Marta, E., & Alfieri, S. (2014). Family conflicts. In A. C. Michalos (Ed.), Encyclopedia of quality of life and well-being research . Springer.
Metcalf, L. (2011). Marriage and family therapy: A practice-oriented approach . Springer.
Sori, C. F., Hecker, L., & Bachenberg, M. E. (2016). The therapist’s notebook for children and adolescents: Homework, handouts, and activities for use in psychotherapy . Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

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Thank you for the resources on family conflict resolution. I am working with a family that is really challenged.

We have had major conflicts in the family with me, my husband, who is the stepdad, and my grown kids. One speaks to us but lives on the northern East Coast. Haven’t seen him in 5 years. The other grown child is my daughter. She has had no contact with us of any kind for 5 years. I look forward to learning how to defuse conflicts and then grow healthy relationships, with my kids especially.

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How to Balance Family Expectations with your Personal Goals

As a child, your goals and expectations may closely align with your parents’. As you get older, you may find that your personal goals begin to differ from your family’s expectations. When that happens, it can create tension in your relationship with your family, and your parents in particular. Here are a few tips to help balance family expectations with your personal goals.

Clearly Separate Your Goals from Their Expectations Many students hear from a young age that they need to go to college. Some are told they need to become a doctor or lawyer. Or that they need to be able to support themselves as soon as they complete college. After hearing these things so often, it may become difficult for students to separate their goals from their parents’ expectations. Take a step back and really look at what you want to do and accomplish in life. Identify what you want, not necessarily what you think your parents expect. It will be much harder to be happy long term if you don’t have clear ownership of your goals.

Help Them Understand Where You Are Coming From While it may be difficult to share your goals with your parents — especially if your goals don’t align with their expectations — it’s a necessary step forward. It’s possible that your parents may not support your goals because they don’t fully understand them. For example, they may not realize that traveling the world for a year after graduating is your way of preparing yourself for a career addressing global issues like climate change, and that you are going to blog about your experiences to create a portfolio. Perhaps you will even consider an advanced degree when you finish traveling. Without context, your parents may not fully understand the extent of your goals and the plans you have in place to succeed. Sharing that information will help them to understand, and hopefully support, your goals.

It’s easy to feel that you owe your parents, or that you will let them down if you don’t meet their expectations. At the end of the day, though, you need to do what makes you happy. Your parents will likely be supportive once they understand how important your goals are to you.

Remember Their Good Intentions Remember, your parents truly do want the best for you. They want you to live a happy and fulfilled life. At times it may seem like they are being unfair or hard on you. Maybe they are. But it’s more likely that they are trying to do what they think is best for you. While their expectations may not necessarily align with your own goals, it doesn’t mean they love you any less.

Balancing family expectations with your personal goals can be challenging, intimidating, and stressful. It may require some honest and uncomfortable conversations. But it doesn’t have to be a source of contention. Take the time to help your family understand your goals, and why they are important to you. Let them see that you are your own person, and while you value what they have done for you, you need to follow your own path. Ultimately you and your family want you to succeed, at whatever your goals may be!

Kimberlee Blevins is an enrolled member of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation; and a descendent of the Hunkpapa Lakota. She was born into the Ciicga Clan. Her traditional name is Sunlight Woman. Blevins, who serves as the AISES Region 5 Student Representative, is currently finishing her MS in environmental science with a concentration on air quality in tribal communities at Sitting Bull College. She earned a BS in environmental science and two associate degrees in pre-engineering and Native American leadership from United Tribes Technical College. Blevins is focused on tribal land restoration and environmental policy. Her passion is working on STEM outreach and inspiring tribal youth.

What should students keep top of mind when working toward a goal that might not be understood or accepted by family members?

Students should keep in mind both their passion and their boundaries. There have been so many times when I’ve been torn between commitments to school and family. It has been an inner battle.

I have two main takeaways from my academic career. The first is to practice time management. I love my schoolwork just as much as I love my family, and having time for both keeps me centered and motivated. The second is that it’s OK to say no to family. The first time you say no will be hard — there may even be hurt feelings on both sides. Ultimately, though, your family loves you and wants to see you succeed. They’ll come around and recognize your priorities.

My final recommendation is for students to always keep their passion in mind. Remind yourself why you are pursuing this path or this goal. For me, I remind myself that I am going on a journey to decolonize the STEM field and infuse it with Indigenous energy.

Remember, nothing worth doing ever comes easy.

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Essay about family problems – Persuasive Essay

In my essay I intend to prove that many family problems are not actual problems and that a simple readjustment of priorities is all that is needed in order to fix the problem. The idea originally came to me whilst watching the movie “Saw 2”. The father and son are having problems in the movie, and then the serial killer in the movie points out that both father and son forget all past indiscretions when the son’s life is threatened. This opened up my mind to the idea that a shift in perspective may be all that is needed in order to fix family problems, and that is what I intend to prove here.

The expectations of parents and children differ in many ways. The child expects increased amounts of independence, whereas the parent expects increased amounts of responsibility from the child. This is a suitable format in which a family may move forwards, but if both parties do not feel that the other is delivering, friction will occur and family problems may arise.

In this case, there may be one perspective that is askew, or both may be askew. For example, the child may be acting with a reasonable amount of responsibility and yet the parents are not seeing it, or the parents may expect an unreasonable amount of responsibility and may even view smaller indiscretions such as a dirty bedroom as a sign of a lack of responsibility.

The child on the other hand may have very incorrect views on how much responsibility he or she is due at whatever age. The child may believe at the age of 11 that he or she can be left alone at night, or that at 15 he or she should be able to drink alcohol. The child may also have a skewered perception of how much responsibility he or she is getting. The child may receive quite a bit of responsibility and not realize it.

There are also times when both parties experience family problems because both do not realize the results of their actions. A child may mess up in a big way on one occasion and not realize that future requests for responsibility will be tarnished by previous actions. The parent may also not realize that there are times when they show their child they have no confidence in that child and it affects the way the child acts in the future. The child may give directions in a train station, but the parent still asks a stranger for directions. This may make the child feel uncomfortable putting his or herself forward for responsibility in the future. Conclusion

In all instances, you can see how a slight change in perspectives can help avoid family problems. This change may be in the way of seeing the situation from the other person’s point of view, and at other times, it may need a change of perspective relating to how one or both parties understand the results of their actions. A slight change in perspective from one or both parties can avoid many family problems.

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125 Family Relationships Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Family relationships are some of the most important connections we have in our lives. They shape who we are, how we interact with others, and the values we hold dear. Writing about family relationships can be a powerful way to explore these dynamics and reflect on the impact they have on our lives. Here are 125 family relationship essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your writing:

The role of siblings in shaping our identity
How parents influence our career choices
The impact of divorce on children's relationships with their parents
The importance of extended family in providing support and guidance
How cultural differences can affect family dynamics
The challenges of blending families through remarriage
The role of grandparents in shaping family traditions
The impact of sibling rivalry on family relationships
How family dynamics change as children grow and become adults
The influence of birth order on personality development
The challenges of maintaining long-distance relationships with family members
The importance of forgiveness in repairing broken family relationships
The impact of addiction on family dynamics
The role of communication in building strong family relationships
How family traditions and rituals strengthen bonds between generations
The impact of social media on family relationships
The challenges of caring for aging parents
The role of family therapy in resolving conflicts and improving communication
The impact of sibling rivalry on self-esteem and social skills
The challenges of balancing work and family responsibilities
The influence of parenting styles on children's behavior
The importance of setting boundaries in family relationships
The impact of divorce on adult children's relationships with their parents
The role of family in providing emotional support during times of crisis
The challenges of dealing with mental health issues within the family
The influence of family values on children's beliefs and attitudes
The impact of sibling relationships on romantic partnerships
The importance of celebrating family milestones and achievements
The challenges of navigating cultural differences within the family
The role of family in shaping our sense of belonging and identity
The impact of trauma on family relationships
The challenges of balancing individual needs with family expectations
The influence of family dynamics on career choices
The importance of open and honest communication in resolving conflicts
The impact of technology on family relationships
The role of family in providing emotional support during times of transition
The challenges of maintaining healthy boundaries in family relationships
The influence of sibling relationships on self-esteem and self-confidence
The importance of self-care in maintaining strong family relationships
The role of family in shaping our values and beliefs
The challenges of navigating generational differences within the family
The influence of family dynamics on mental health and well-being
The challenges of dealing with aging parents
The influence of sibling relationships on romantic partnerships
The impact of sibling rivalry on family dynamics
The influence of family dynamics

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Family, culture, and communication.

V. Santiago Arias V. Santiago Arias College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
and Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.504
Published online: 22 August 2017

Through the years, the concept of family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists with a diverse theoretical framework, such as family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory. Among these theories, there are two main commonalities throughout its findings: the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial system because the quality of their communication or coparenting significantly affects the enactment of the caregiver role while managing conflicts, which are not the exception in the familial setting. Coparenting is understood in its broader sense to avoid an extensive discussion of all type of families in our society. Second, while including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, this process intrinsically suggests cultural assimilation as the main cultural approach rather than intergroup theory, because intercultural marriages need to decide which values are considered the best to be socialized. In order to do so, examples from the Thai culture and Hispanic and Latino cultures served to show cultural assimilation as an important mediator of coparenting communication patterns, which subsequently affect other subsystems that influence individuals’ identity and self-esteem development in the long run. Finally, future directions suggest that the need for incorporating a nonhegemonic one-way definition of cultural assimilation allows immigration status to be brought into the discussion of family communication issues in the context of one of the most diverse countries in the world.

parental communication
dyadic power
family communication systems
cultural assimilation

Introduction

Family is the fundamental structure of every society because, among other functions, this social institution provides individuals, from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging, economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization (Canary & Canary, 2013 ). As a consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a system in a manner that would benefit all members of a family while achieving what is considered best, where decisions tend to be coherent, at least according to the norms and roles assumed by family members within the system (Galvin, Bylund, & Brommel, 2004 ). Notwithstanding, the concept of family can be interpreted differently by individual perceptions to an array of cultural backgrounds, and cultures vary in their values, behaviors, and ideas.

The difficulty of conceptualizing this social institution suggests that family is a culture-bound phenomenon (Bales & Parsons, 2014 ). In essence, culture represents how people view themselves as part of a unique social collective and the ensuing communication interactions (Olaniran & Roach, 1994 ); subsequently, culture provides norms for behavior having a tremendous impact on those family members’ roles and power dynamics mirrored in its communication interactions (Johnson, Radesky, & Zuckerman, 2013 ). Thus, culture serves as one of the main macroframeworks for individuals to interpret and enact those prescriptions, such as inheritance; descent rules (e.g., bilateral, as in the United States, or patrilineal); marriage customs, such as ideal monogamy and divorce; and beliefs about sexuality, gender, and patterns of household formation, such as structure of authority and power (Weisner, 2014 ). For these reasons, “every family is both a unique microcosm and a product of a larger cultural context” (Johnson et al., 2013 , p. 632), and the analysis of family communication must include culture in order to elucidate effective communication strategies to solve familial conflicts.

In addition, to analyze familial communication patterns, it is important to address the most influential interaction with regard to power dynamics that determine the overall quality of family functioning. In this sense, within the range of family theories, parenting function is the core relationship in terms of power dynamics. Parenting refers to all efforts and decisions made by parents individually to guide their children’s behavior. This is a pivotal function, but the quality of communication among people who perform parenting is fundamental because their internal communication patterns will either support or undermine each caregiver’s parenting attempts, individually having a substantial influence on all members’ psychological and physical well-being (Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Subsequently, parenting goes along with communication because to execute all parenting efforts, there must be a mutual agreement among at least two individuals to conjointly take care of the child’s fostering (Van Egeren & Hawkins, 2004 ). Consequently, coparenting serves as a crucial predictor of the overall family atmosphere and interactions, and it deserves special attention while analyzing family communication issues.

Through the years, family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists, but interaction behaviors define the interpersonal relationship, roles, and power within the family as a system (Rogers, 2006 ). Consequently, family scholarship relies on a wide range of theories developed within the communication field and in areas of the social sciences (Galvin, Braithwaite, & Bylund, 2015 ) because analysis of communication patterns in the familial context offers more ecological validity that individuals’ self-report measures. As many types of interactions may happen within a family, there are many relevant venues (i.e., theories) for scholarly analysis on this subject, which will be discussed later in this article in the “ Family: Theoretical Perspectives ” section. To avoid the risk of cultural relativeness while defining family, this article characterizes family as “a long-term group of two or more people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties and who enact those ties through ongoing interactions providing instrumental and/or emotional support” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 5).

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most relevant theories in family communication to identify frustrations and limitations with internal communication. Second, as a case in point, the United States welcomes more than 50 million noncitizens as temporary visitors and admits approximately 1 million immigrants to live as lawful residents yearly (Fullerton, 2014 ), this demographic pattern means that nearly one-third of the population (102 million) comes from different cultural backgrounds, and therefore, the present review will incorporate culture as an important mediator for coparenting, so that future research can be performed to find specific techniques and training practices that are more suitable for cross-cultural contexts.

Family: Theoretical Perspectives

Even though the concept of family can be interpreted individually and differently in different cultures, there are also some commonalities, along with communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members disregarding cultural differences. This section will provide a brief overview of the conceptualization of family through the family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory, with a special focus on the interparental relationship.

Family Communication Patterns Theory

One of the most relevant approaches to address the myriad of communication issues within families is the family communication patterns (FCP) theory. Originally developed by McLeod and Chaffee ( 1973 ), this theory aims to understand families’ tendencies to create stable and predictable communication patterns in terms of both relational cognition and interpersonal behavior (Braithwaite & Baxter, 2005 ). Specifically, this theory focuses on the unique and amalgamated associations derived from interparental communication and its impact on parenting quality to determine FCPs and the remaining interactions (Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

To illustrate FCP’s focus on parental communication, Schrodt, Witt, and Shimkowski ( 2014 ) conducted a meta-analysis of 74 studies (N = 14,255) to examine the associations between the demand/withdraw family communication patterns of interaction, and the subsequent individual, relational, and communicative outcomes. The cumulative evidence suggests that wife demand/husband withdraw and husband demand/wife withdraw show similar moderate correlations with communicative and psychological well-being outcomes, and even higher when both patterns are taken together (at the relational level). This is important because one of the main tenets of FCP is that familial relationships are drawn on the pursuit of coorientation among members. Coorientation refers to the cognitive process of two or more individuals focusing on and assessing the same object in the same material and social context, which leads to a number of cognitions as the number of people involved, which results in different levels of agreement, accuracy, and congruence (for a review, see Fitzpatrick & Koerner, 2005 ); for example, in dyads that are aware of their shared focus, two different cognitions of the same issue will result.

Hereafter, the way in which these cognitions are socialized through power dynamics determined socially and culturally by roles constitutes specific interdependent communication patterns among family members. For example, Koerner and Fitzpatrick ( 2006 ) provide a taxonomy of family types on the basis of coorientation and its impact on communication pattern in terms of the degree of conformity in those conversational tendencies. To wit, consensual families mostly agree for the sake of the hierarchy within a given family and to explore new points of view; pluralistic families allow members to participate equally in conversations and there is no pressure to control or make children’s decisions; protective families maintain the hierarchy by making decisions for the sake of achieving common family goals; and laissez-faire families, which are low in conversation and conformity orientation, allow family members to not get deeply involved in the family.

The analysis of family communication patterns is quintessential for family communication scholarly work because it influences forming an individual’s self concept in the long run. As a case in point, Young and Schrodt ( 2016 ) surveyed 181 young adults from intact families, where conditional and interaction effects between communication patterns and conformity orientation were observed as the main predictors of future romantic partners. Moreover, this study concluded that FCPs and interparental confirmation are substantial indicators of self-to-partner confirmation, after controlling for reciprocity of confirmation within the romantic relationship. As a consequence, FCP influences children’s and young adults’ perceptions of romantic behavior (e.g., Fowler, Pearson, & Beck, 2010 ); the quality of communication behavior, such as the degree of acceptation of verbal aggression in romantic dyads (e.g., Aloia & Solomon, 2013 ); gender roles; and conflict styles (e.g., Taylor & Segrin, 2010 ), and parental modeling (e.g., Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

This suggests three important observations. First, family is a very complex interpersonal context, in which communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members interact as subsystems (see Galvin et al., 2004 ; Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Second, among those subsystems, the core interaction is the individuals who hold parenting roles (i.e., intact and post divorced families); the couple (disregarding particular sexual orientations), and, parenting roles have a reciprocal relationship over time (Le, McDaniel, Leavitt, & Feinberg, 2016 ). Communication between parenting partners is crucial for the development of their entire family; for example, Schrodt and Shimkowski ( 2013 ) conducted a survey with 493 young adult children from intact (N = 364) and divorced families (N = 129) about perceptions of interparental conflict that involves triangulation (the impression of being in the “middle” and feeling forced to display loyalty to one of the parents). Results suggest that supportive coparental communication positively predicts relational satisfaction with mothers and fathers, as well as mental health; on the other hand, antagonist and hostile coparental communication predicted negative marital satisfaction.

Consequently, “partners’ communication with one another will have a positive effect on their overall view of their marriage, . . . and directly result[ing in] their views of marital satisfaction” (Knapp & Daly, 2002 , p. 643). Le et al. ( 2016 ) conducted a longitudinal study to evaluate the reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and coparenting from the perspective of both parents in terms of support or undermining across the transition to parenthood from a dyadic perspective; 164 cohabiting heterosexual couples expecting their first child were analyzed from pregnancy until 36 months after birth. Both parents’ interdependence was examined in terms of three variables: gender difference analysis, stability over time in marriage and coparenting, and reciprocal associations between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining. The findings suggest a long-term reciprocal association between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining in heterosexual families; the quality of marriage relationship during prenatal stage is highly influential in coparenting after birth for both men and women; but, coparenting is connected to romantic relationship quality only for women.

Moreover, the positive association between coparenting and the parents’ relationship relates to the spillover hypothesis, which posits that the positive or negative factors in the parental subsystem are significantly associated with higher or lower marital satisfaction in the spousal subsystem, respectively. Ergo, overall parenting performance is substantially affected by the quality of marital communication patterns.

Dyadic Power

In addition, after analyzing the impact of marital interaction quality in families on marital satisfaction and future parental modeling, it is worth noting that marital satisfaction and coparenting are importantly mediated by power dynamics within the couple (Halstead, De Santis, & Williams, 2016 ), and even mediates marital commitment (e.g., Lennon, Stewart, & Ledermann, 2013 ). If the quality of interpersonal relationship between those individuals who hold parenting roles determines coparenting quality as well, then the reason for this association lies on the fact that virtually all intimate relationships are substantially characterized by power dynamics; when partners perceive more rewards than costs in the relationship, they will be more satisfied and significantly more committed to the relationship (Lennon et al., 2013 ). As a result, the inclusion of power dynamics in the analysis of family issues becomes quintessential.

For the theory of dyadic power, power in its basic sense includes dominance, control, and influence over others, as well as a means to meet survival needs. When power is integrated into dyadic intimate relationships, it generates asymmetries in terms of interdependence between partners due to the quality of alternatives provided by individual characteristics such as socioeconomic status and cultural characteristics such as gender roles. This virtually gives more power to men than women. Power refers to “the feeling derived from the ability to dominate, or control, the behavior, affect, and cognitions of another person[;] in consequence, this concept within the interparental relationship is enacted when one partner who controls resources and limiting the behavioral options of the other partner” (Lennon et al., 2013 , p. 97). Ergo, this theory examines power in terms of interdependence between members of the relationship: the partner who is more dependent on the other has less power in the relationship, which, of course, directly impact parenting decisions.

As a case in point, Worley and Samp ( 2016 ) examined the balance of decision-making power in the relationship, complaint avoidance, and complaint-related appraisals in 175 heterosexual couples. Findings suggest that decision-making power has a curvilinear association, in which individuals engaged in the least complaint avoidance when they were relatively equal to their partners in terms of power. In other words, perceptions of one another’s power potentially encourage communication efficacy in the interparental couple.

The analysis of power in intimate relationships, and, to be specific, between parents is crucial because it not only relates to marital satisfaction and commitment, but it also it affects parents’ dyadic coping for children. In fact, Zemp, Bodenmann, Backes, Sutter-Stickel, and Revenson ( 2016 ) investigated parents’ dyadic coping as a predictor of children’s internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and prosocial behavior in three independent studies. When there is a positive relationship among all three factors, the results indicated that the strongest correlation was the first one. Again, the quality of the marital and parental relationships has the strongest influence on children’s coping skills and future well-being.

From the overview of the two previous theories on family, it is worth addressing two important aspects. First, parenting requires an intensive great deal of hands-on physical care, attention to safety (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ), and interpretation of cues, and this is why parenting, from conception to when children enter adulthood, is a tremendous social, cultural, and legally prescribed role directed toward caregiving and endlessly attending to individuals’ social, physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive development (Johnson et al., 2013 ). And while parents are making decisions about what they consider is best for all family members, power dynamics play a crucial role in marital satisfaction, commitment, parental modeling, and overall interparental communication efficacy in the case of postdivorce families. Therefore, the likelihood of conflict is latent within familial interactions while making decisions; indeed, situations in which family members agree on norms as a consensus is rare (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ).

In addition to the interparental and marital power dynamics that delineates family communication patterns, the familial interaction is distinctive from other types of social relationships in the unequaled role of emotions and communication of affection while family members interact and make decisions for the sake of all members. For example, Ritchie and Fitzpatrick ( 1990 ) provided evidence that fathers tended to perceive that all other family members agree with his decisions or ideas. Even when mothers confronted and disagreed with the fathers about the fathers’ decisions or ideas, the men were more likely to believe that their children agreed with him. When the children were interviewed without their parents, however, the majority of children agreed with the mothers rather than the fathers (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ). Subsequently, conflict is highly present in families; however, in general, the presence of conflict is not problematic per se. Rather, it is the ability to manage and recover from it and that could be problematic (Floyd, 2014 ).

One of the reasons for the role of emotions in interpersonal conflicts is explained by the Emotion-in-Relationships Model (ERM). This model states that feelings of bliss, satisfaction, and relaxation often go unnoticed due to the nature of the emotions, whereas “hot” emotions, such as anger and contempt, come to the forefront when directed at a member of an interpersonal relationship (Fletcher & Clark, 2002 ). This type of psychophysical response usually happens perhaps due to the different biophysical reactive response of the body compared to its reaction to positive ones (Floyd, 2014 ). There are two dimensions that define conflict. Conflict leads to the elicitation of emotions, but sometimes the opposite occurs: emotions lead to conflict. The misunderstanding or misinterpretation of emotions among members of a family can be a source of conflict, as well as a number of other issues, including personality differences, past history, substance abuse, mental or physical health problems, monetary issues, children, intimate partner violence, domestic rape, or maybe just general frustration due to recent events (Sabourin, Infante, & Rudd, 1990 ). In order to have a common understanding of this concept for the familial context in particular, conflict refers to as “any incompatibility that can be expressed by people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 6). Thus, the concept of conflict goes hand in hand with coparenting.

There is a myriad of everyday family activities in which parents need to decide the best way to do them: sometimes they are minor, such as eating, watching TV, or sleeping schedules; others are more complicated, such as schooling. Certainly, while socializing and making these decisions, parents may agree or not, and these everyday situations may lead to conflict. Whether or not parents live together, it has been shown that “the extent to which children experience their parents as partners or opponents in parenting is related to children’s adjustment and well-being” (Gable & Sharp, 2016 , p. 1), because the ontology of parenting is materialized through socialization of values about every aspect and duty among all family members, especially children, to perpetuate a given society.

As the findings provided in this article show, the study of family communication issues is pivotal because the way in which those issues are solved within families will be copied by children as their values. Values are abstract ideas that delineate behavior toward the evaluation of people and events and vary in terms of importance across individuals, but also among cultures. In other words, their future parenting (i.e., parenting modeling) of children will replicate those same strategies for conflict solving for good or bad, depending on whether parents were supportive between each other. Thus, socialization defines the size and scope of coparenting.

The familial socialization of values encompasses the distinction between parents’ personal execution of those social appraisals and the values that parents want their children to adopt, and both are different things; nonetheless, familial socialization does not take place in only one direction, from parents to children. Benish-Weisman, Levy, and Knafo ( 2013 ) investigated the differentiation process—or, in other words, the distinction between parents’ own personal values and their socialization values and the contribution of children’s values to their parents’ socialization values. In this study, in which 603 Israeli adolescents and their parents participated, the findings suggest that parents differentiate between their personal values and their socialization values, and adolescents’ values have a specific contribution to their parents’ socialization values. As a result, socialization is not a unidirectional process affected by parents alone, it is an outcome of the reciprocal interaction between parents and their adolescent children, and the given importance of a given value is mediated by parents and their culture individually (Johnson et al., 2013 ). However, taking power dynamics into account does not mean that adolescents share the same level of decision-making power in the family; thus, socialization take place in both directions, but mostly from parents to children. Finally, it is worth noticing that the socialization of values in coparenting falls under the cultural umbrella. The next section pays a special attention to the role of culture in family communication.

The Role of Culture in Parenting Socialization of Values

There are many individual perceived realities and behaviors in the familial setting that may lead to conflict among members, but all of them achieve a common interpretation through culture; indeed, “all family conflict processes by broad cultural factors” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 46). Subsequently, the goal of this section is to provide an overview of the perceived realities and behaviors that exist in family relationships with different cultural backgrounds. How should one approach the array of cultural values influencing parental communication patterns?

An interesting way of immersing on the role of culture in family communication patterns and its further socialization of values is explored by Schwartz ( 1992 ). The author developed a value system composed of 10 values operationalized as motivational goals for modern society: (a) self-direction (independence of thought and action); (b) stimulation (excitement, challenge, and novelty); (c) hedonism (pleasure or sensuous gratification); (d) achievement (personal success according to social standards); (e) power (social status, dominance over people and resources); (f) conformity (restraint of actions that may harm others or violate social expectations); (g) tradition (respect and commitment to cultural or religious customs and ideas); (h) benevolence (preserving and enhancing the welfare of people to whom one is close); (i) universalism (understanding, tolerance, and concern for the welfare of all people and nature); and (j) security (safety and stability of society, relationships, and self).

Later, Schwartz and Rubel ( 2005 ) applied this value structure, finding it to be commonly shared among over 65 countries. Nevertheless, these values are enacted in different ways by societies and genders about the extent to which men attribute more relevance to values of power, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, and self-direction, and the opposite was found for benevolence and universalism and less consistently for security. Also, it was found that all sex differences were culturally moderated, suggesting that cultural background needs to be considered in the analysis of coparental communication when socializing those values.

Even though Schwartz’s work was more focused on individuals and societies, it is a powerful model for the analysis of the role of culture on family communication and parenting scholarships. Indeed, Schwartz et al. ( 2013 ) conducted a longitudinal study with a sample of 266 Hispanic adolescents (14 years old) and their parents that looked at measures of acculturation, family functioning, and adolescent conduct problems, substance use, and sexual behavior at five time points. Results suggest that higher levels of acculturation in adolescents were linked to poorer family functioning; however, overall assimilation negatively predicted adolescent cigarette smoking, sexual activity, and unprotected sex. The authors emphasize the role of culture, and acculturation patterns in particular, in understanding the mediating role of family functioning and culture.

Ergo, it is crucial to address the ways in which culture affects family functioning. On top of this idea, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) observed that Western cultures such as in the United States and European countries are oriented toward autonomy, favoring individual achievement, self-reliance, and self-assertiveness. Thus, coparenting in more autonomous countries will socialize to children the idea that achievement in life is an outcome of independence, resulting in coparenting communication behaviors that favor verbal praise and feedback over physical contact. As opposed to autonomy-oriented cultures, other societies, such as Asian, African, and Latin American countries, emphasize interdependence over autonomy; thus, parenting in these cultures promotes collective achievement, sharing, and collaboration as the core values.

These cultural orientations can be observed in parents’ definitions of school readiness and educational success; for Western parents, examples include skills such as counting, recognizing letters, or independently completing tasks such as coloring pictures, whereas for more interdependent cultures, the development of obedience, respect for authority, and appropriate social skills are the skills that parents are expecting their children to develop to evaluate school readiness. As a matter of fact, Callaghan et al. ( 2011 ) conducted a series of eight studies to evaluate the impact of culture on the social-cognitive skills of one- to three-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings such as Canada, Peru, and India. The results showed that children’s acquisition of specific cognitive skills is moderated by specific learning experiences in a specific context: while Canadian children were understanding the performance of both pretense and pictorial symbols skillfully between 2.5 and 3.0 years of age, on average, Peruvian and Indian children mastered those skills more than a year later. Notwithstanding, this finding does not suggest any kind of cultural superiority; language barriers and limitations derived from translation itself may influence meanings, affecting the results (Sotomayor-Peterson, De Baca, Figueredo, & Smith-Castro, 2013 ). Therefore, in line with the findings of Schutz ( 1970 ), Geertz ( 1973 ), Grusec ( 2002 ), Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ), and Johnson et al. ( 2013 ), cultural values provide important leverage for understanding family functioning in terms of parental decision-making and conflict, which also has a substantial impact on children’s cognitive development.

Subsequently, cultural sensitivity to the analysis of the familial system in this country needs to be specially included because cultural differences are part of the array of familial conflicts that may arise, and children experience real consequences from the quality of these interactions. Therefore, parenting, which is already arduous in itself, and overall family functioning significantly become troublesome when parents with different cultural backgrounds aim to socialize values and perform parenting tasks. The following section provides an account of these cross-cultural families.

Intercultural Families: Adding Cultural Differences to Interparental Communication

For a country such as the United States, with 102 million people from many different cultural backgrounds, the presence of cross-cultural families is on the rise, as is the likelihood of intermarriage between immigrants and natives. With this cultural diversity, the two most prominent groups are Hispanics and Asians, particular cases of which will be discussed next. Besides the fact that parenting itself is a very complex and difficult task, certainly the biggest conflict consists of making decisions about the best way to raise children in terms of their values with regard to which ethnic identity better enacts the values that parents believe their children should embrace. As a result, interracial couples might confront many conflicts and challenges due to cultural differences affecting marital satisfaction and coparenting.

Assimilation , the degree to which a person from a different cultural background has adapted to the culture of the hostage society, is an important phenomenon in intermarriage. Assimilationists observe that children from families in which one of the parents is from the majority group and the other one from the minority do not automatically follow the parent from the majority group (Cohen, 1988 ). Indeed, they follow their mothers more, whichever group she belongs to, because of mothers are more prevalent among people with higher socioeconomic status (Gordon, 1964 ; Portes, 1984 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

In an interracial marriage, the structural and interpersonal barriers inhibiting the interaction between two parents will be reduced significantly if parents develop a noncompeting way to communicate and solve conflicts, which means that both of them might give up part of their culture or ethnic identity to reach consensus. Otherwise, the ethnic identity of children who come from interracial marriages will become more and more obscure (Saenz, Hwang, Aguirre, & Anderson, 1995 ). Surely, parents’ noncompeting cultural communication patterns are fundamental for children’s development of ethnic identity. Biracial children develop feelings of being outsiders, and then parenting becomes crucial to developing their strong self-esteem (Ward, 2006 ). Indeed, Gordon ( 1964 ) found that children from cross-racial or cross-ethnic marriages are at risk of developing psychological problems. In another example, Jognson and Nagoshi ( 1986 ) studied children who come from mixed marriages in Hawaii and found that the problems of cultural identification, conflicting demands in the family, and of being marginal in either culture still exist (Mann & Waldron, 1977 ). It is hard for those mixed-racial children to completely develop the ethnic identity of either the majority group or the minority group.

The question of how children could maintain their minority ethnic identity is essential to the development of ethnic identity as a whole. For children from interracial marriage, the challenge to maintain their minority ethnic identity will be greater than for the majority ethnic identity (Waters, 1990 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ) because the minority-group spouse is more likely to have greater ethnic consciousness than the majority-group spouse (Ellman, 1987 ). Usually, the majority group is more influential than the minority group on a child’s ethnic identity, but if the minority parent’s ethnicity does not significantly decline, the child’s ethnic identity could still reflect some characteristics of the minority parent. If parents want their children to maintain the minority group’s identity, letting the children learn the language of the minority group might be a good way to achieve this. By learning the language, children form a better understanding of that culture and perhaps are more likely to accept the ethnic identity that the language represents (Xin & Sandel, 2015 ).

In addition to language socialization as a way to contribute to children’s identity in biracial families, Jane and Bochner ( 2009 ) indicated that family rituals and stories could be important in performing and transforming identity. Families create and re-create their identities through various kinds of narrative, in which family stories and rituals are significant. Festivals and rituals are different from culture to culture, and each culture has its own. Therefore, exposing children to the language, rituals, and festivals of another culture also could be helpful to form their ethnic identity, in order to counter problems of self-esteem derived from the feeling of being an outsider.

To conclude this section, the parenting dilemma in intercultural marriages consists of deciding which culture they want their children to be exposed to and what kind of heritage they want to pass to children. The following section will provide two examples of intercultural marriages in the context of American society without implying that there are no other insightful cultures that deserve analysis, but the focus on Asian-American and Hispanics families reflects the available literature (Canary & Canary, 2013 ) and its demographic representativeness in this particular context. In addition, in order to acknowledge that minorities within this larger cultural background deserve more attention due to overemphasis on larger cultures in scholarship, such as Chinese or Japanese cultures, the Thai family will provide insights into understanding the role of culture in parenting and its impact on the remaining familial interaction, putting all theories already discussed in context. Moreover, the Hispanic family will also be taken in account because of its internal pan-ethnicity variety.

An Example of Intercultural Parenting: The Thai Family

The Thai family, also known as Krob Krua, may consist of parents, children, paternal and maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, in-laws, and any others who share the same home. Thai marriages usually are traditional, in which the male is the authority figure and breadwinner and the wife is in charge of domestic items and the homemaker. It has been noted that Thai mothers tend to be the major caregivers and caretakers in the family rather than fathers (Tulananda, Young, & Roopnarine, 1994 ). On the other hand, it has been shown that Thai mothers also tend to spoil their children with such things as food and comfort; Tulananda et al. ( 1994 ) studied the differences between American and Thai fathers’ involvement with their preschool children and found that American fathers reported being significantly more involved with their children than Thai fathers. Specifically, the fathers differed in the amount of socialization and childcare; Thai fathers reported that they obtained more external support from other family members than American fathers; also, Thai fathers were more likely to obtain support for assisting with daughters than sons.

Furthermore, with regard to the family context, Tulananda and Roopnarine ( 2001 ) noted that over the years, some attention has been focused on the cultural differences among parent-child behaviors and interactions; hereafter, the authors believed that it is important to look at cultural parent-child interactions because that can help others understand children’s capacity to socialize and deal with life’s challenges. As a matter of fact, the authors also noted that Thai families tend to raise their children in accordance with Buddhist beliefs. It is customary for young Thai married couples to live with either the wife’s parents (uxorilocal) or the husband’s parents (virilocal) before living on their own (Tulananda & Roopnarine, 2001 ). The process of developing ethnicity could be complicated. Many factors might influence the process, such as which parent is from the minority culture and the cultural community, as explained in the previous section of this article.

This suggests that there is a difference in the way that Thai and American fathers communicate with their daughters. As a case in point, Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ) examined the relationship maintenance behaviors within father-daughter relationships in Thailand and the United States. Participants included 134 American father-daughter dyads and 154 Thai father-daughter dyads. The findings suggest that when quality of communication was included in this relationship, both types of families benefit from this family communication pattern, resulting in better conflict management and advice relationship maintenance behaviors. However, differences were found: American fathers are more likely than American daughters to employ relationship maintenance behaviors; in addition, American fathers are more likely than Thai fathers to use relationship maintenance strategies.

As a consequence, knowing the process of ethnic identity development could provide parents with different ways to form children’s ethnic identity. More specifically, McCann, Ota, Giles, and Caraker ( 2003 ), and Canary and Canary ( 2013 ) noted that Southeast Asian cultures have been overlooked in communication studies research; these countries differ in their religious, political, and philosophical thoughts, with a variety of collectivistic views and religious ideals (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism, Islam), whereas the United States is mainly Christian and consists of individualistic values.

The Case of Hispanic/Latino Families in the United States

There is a need for including Hispanic/Latino families in the United States because of the demographic representativeness and trends of the ethnicity: in 2016 , Hispanics represent nearly 17% of the total U.S. population, becoming the largest minority group. There are more than 53 million Hispanics and Latinos in the United States; in addition, over 93% of young Hispanics and Latinos under the age of 18 hold U.S. citizenship, and more than 73,000 of these people turn 18 every month (Barreto & Segura, 2014 ). Furthermore, the current Hispanic and Latino population is spread evenly between foreign-born and U.S.-born individuals, but the foreign-born population is now growing faster than the number of Hispanic children born in the country (Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ). This demographic trend is projected to reach one-third of the U.S. total population by 2060 ; therefore, with the growth of other minority populations in the country, the phenomenon of multiracial marriage and biracial children is increasing as well.

Therefore, family communication scholarship has an increasing necessity to include cultural particularities in the analysis of the familial system; in addition to the cultural aspects already explained in this article, this section addresses the influence of familism in Hispanic and Latino familial interactions, as well as how immigration status moderates the internal interactions, reflected in levels of acculturation, that affect these families negatively.

With the higher marriage and birth rates among Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States compared to non-Latino Whites and African American populations, the Hispanic familial system is perhaps the most stereotyped as being familistic (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). This family trait consists of the fact that Hispanics place a very high value on marriage and childbearing, on the basis of a profound commitment to give support to members of the extended family as well. This can be evinced in the prevalence of extended-kind shared households in Hispanic and Latino families, and Hispanic children are more likely to live in extended-family households than non-Latino Whites or blacks (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). Living in extended-family households, most likely with grandparents, may have positive influences on Hispanic and Latino children, such as greater attention and interaction with loving through consistent caregiving; grandparents may help by engaging with children in academic-oriented activities, which then affects positively cognitive educational outcomes.

However, familism is not the panacea for all familial issues for several reasons. First, living in an extended-family household requires living arrangements that consider adults’ needs more than children’s. Second, the configuration of Hispanic and Latino households is moderated by any immigration issues with all members of the extended family, and this may cause problems for children (Menjívar, 2000 ). The immigration status of each individual member may produce a constant state of flux, whereas circumstances change to adjust to economic opportunities, which in turn are limited by immigration laws, and it gets even worse when one of the parents isn’t even present in the children’s home, but rather live in their home country (Van Hook & Glick, 2006 ). Although Hispanic and Latino children are more likely to live with married parents and extended relatives, familism is highly affected by the immigration status of each member.

On the other hand, there has been research to address the paramount role of communication disregarding the mediating factor of cultural diversity. For example, Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ) performed a cross-cultural comparison of the association between coparenting or shared parental effort and family climate among families from Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica. The overall findings suggest what was explained earlier in this article: more shared parenting predicts better marital interaction and family climate overall.

In addition, parenting quality has been found to have a positive relationship with children’s developmental outcomes. In fact, Sotomayor-Peterson, Figueredo, Christensen, and Taylor ( 2012 ) conducted a study with 61 low-income Mexican American couples, with at least one child between three and four years of age, recruited from a home-based Head Start program. The main goal of this study was to observe the extent that shared parenting incorporates cultural values and income predicts family climate. The findings suggest that the role of cultural values such as familism, in which family solidarity and avoidance of confrontation are paramount, delineate shared parenting by Mexican American couples.

Cultural adaptation also has a substantial impact on marital satisfaction and children’s cognitive stimulation. Indeed, Sotomayor-Peterson, Wilhelm, and Card ( 2011 ) investigated the relationship between marital relationship quality and subsequent cognitive stimulation practices toward their infants in terms of the actor and partner effects of White and Hispanic parents. The results indicate an interesting relationship between the level of acculturation and marital relationship quality and a positive cognitive stimulation of infants; specifically, marital happiness is associated with increased cognitive stimulation by White and high-acculturated Hispanic fathers. Nevertheless, a major limitation of Hispanic acculturation literature has been seen, reflecting a reliance on cross-sectional studies where acculturation was scholarly operationalized more as an individual difference variable than as a longitudinal adaptation over time (Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

Culture and Family Communication: the “so what?” Question

This article has presented an entangled overview of family communication patterns, dyadic power, family systems, and conflict theories to establish that coparenting quality plays a paramount role. The main commonality among those theories pays special attention to interparental interaction quality, regardless of the type of family (i.e., intact, postdivorce, same-sex, etc.) and cultural background. After reviewing these theories, it was observed that the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial context because it affects children from their earlier cognitive development to subsequent parental modeling in terms of gender roles. Thus, in keeping with Canary and Canary ( 2013 ), no matter what approach may be taken to the analysis of family communication issues, the hypothesis that a positive emotional climate within the family is fostered only when couples practice a sufficient level of shared parenting and quality of communication is supported.

Nevertheless, this argument does not suggest that the role of culture in the familial interactions should be undersold. While including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, in the second section of this article, the text also provides specific values of different countries that are enacted and socialized differently across cultural contexts to address the role of acculturation in the familial atmosphere, the quality of interactions, and individual outcomes. As a case in point, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) provided an interesting way of seeing how cultures differ in their ways of enacting parenting, clarifying that the role of culture in parenting is not a superficial or relativistic element.

In addition, by acknowledging the perhaps excessive attention to larger Asian cultural backgrounds (such as Chinese or Japanese cultures) by other scholars (i.e., Canary & Canary, 2013 ), an insightful analysis of the Thai American family within the father-daughter relationship was provided to exemplify, through the work of Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ), how specific family communication patterns, such as maintenance relationship communication behaviors, affect the quality of familial relationships. Moreover, a second, special focus was put on Hispanic families because of the demographic trends of the United States, and it was found that familism constitutes a distinctive aspect of these families.

In other words, the third section of this article provided these two examples of intercultural families to observe specific ways that culture mediates the familial system. Because one of the main goals of the present article was to demonstrate the mediating role of culture as an important consideration for family communication issues in the United States, the assimilationist approach was taken into account; thus, the two intercultural family examples discussed here correspond to an assimilationist nature rather than using an intergroup approach.

This decision was made without intending to diminish the value of other cultures or ethnic groups in the country, but an extensive revision of all types of intercultural families is beyond the scope of this article. Second, the assimilationist approach forces one to consider cultures that are in the process of adapting to a new hosting culture, and the Thai and Hispanic families in the United States comply with this theoretical requisite. For example, Whites recognize African Americans as being as American as Whites (i.e., Dovidio, Gluszek, John, Ditlmann, & Lagunes, 2010 ), whereas they associate Hispanics and Latinos with illegal immigration in the United States (Stewart et al., 2011 ), which has been enhanced by the U.S. media repeatedly since 1994 (Valentino et al., 2013 ), and it is still happening (Dixon, 2015 ). In this scenario, “ask yourself what would happen to your own personality if you heard it said over and over again that you were lazy, a simple child of nature, expected to steal, and had inferior blood? . . . One’s reputation, whether false or true, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into one’s head without doing something to one’s character” (Allport, 1979 , p. 142, cited in Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ).

As a consequence, on this cultural canvas, it should not be surprising that Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) found that second-generation Hispanics are increasingly likely to marry foreign-born Hispanics and less likely to marry third-generation or later coethnics or Whites. In addition, this study suggests that third-generation Hispanics and later were more likely than in the past to marry non-Hispanic Whites; thus, the authors concluded that there has been a new retreat from intermarriage among the largest immigrant groups in the United States—Hispanics and Asians—in the last 20 years.

If we subscribe to the idea that cultural assimilation goes in only one direction—from the hegemonic culture to the minority culture—then the results of Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) should not be of scholarly concern; however, if we believe that cultural assimilation happens in both directions and intercultural families can benefit both the host and immigrant cultures (for a review, see Schwartz et al., 2013 ), then this is important to address in a country that just elected a president, Donald Trump, who featured statements racially lambasting and segregating minorities, denigrating women, and criticizing immigration as some of the main tenets of his campaign. Therefore, we hope that it is clear why special attention was given to the Thai and Hispanic families in this article, considering the impact of culture on the familial system, marital satisfaction, parental communication, and children’s well-being. Even though individuals with Hispanic ancentry were in the United States even before it became a nation, Hispanic and Latino families are still trying to convince Americans of their right to be accepted in American culture and society.

With regard to the “So what?” question, assimilation is important to consider while analyzing the role of culture in family communication patterns, power dynamics, conflict, or the functioning of the overall family system in the context of the United States. This is because this country is among the most popular in the world in terms of immigration requests, and its demographics show that one out of three citizens comes from an ethnic background other than the hegemonic White culture. In sum, cultural awareness has become pivotal in the analysis of family communication issues in the United States. Furthermore, the present overview of family, communication, and culture ends up supporting the idea of positive associations being derived from the pivotal role of marriage relationship quality, such that coparenting and communication practices vary substantially within intercultural marriages moderated by gender roles.

Culture is a pivotal moderator of these associations, but this analysis needs to be tethered to societal structural level, in which cultural differences, family members’ immigration status, media content, and level of acculturation must be included in family research. This is because in intercultural marriages, in addition to the tremendous parenting role, they have to deal with cultural assimilation and discrimination, and this becomes important if we care about children’s cognitive development and the overall well-being of those who are not considered White. As this article shows, the quality of familial interactions has direct consequences on children’s developmental outcomes (for a review, see Callaghan et al., 2011 ).

Therefore, the structure and functioning of family has an important impact on public health at both physiological and psychological levels (Gage, Everett, & Bullock, 2006 ). At the physiological level, the familial interaction instigates expression and reception of strong feelings affecting tremendously on individuals’ physical health because it activates neuroendocrine responses that aid stress regulation, acting as a stress buffer and accelerating physiological recovery from elevated stress (Floyd & Afifi, 2012 ; Floyd, 2014 ). Robles, Shaffer, Malarkey, and Kiecolt-Glaser ( 2006 ) found that a combination of supportive communication, humor, and problem-solving behavior in husbands predicts their wives’ cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)—both physiological factors are considered as stress markers (see 2006 ). On the other hand, the psychology of individuals, the quality of family relationships has major repercussions on cognitive development, as reflected in educational attainment (Sohr-Preston et al., 2013 ), and highly mediated by cultural assimilation (Schwartz et al., 2013 ), which affects individuals through parenting modeling and socialization of values (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ).

Parental Expectations and Children's Academic Performance in Sociocultural Context

Review Article
Open access
Published: 04 March 2010
Volume 22 , pages 189–214, ( 2010 )

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Yoko Yamamoto 1 &
Susan D. Holloway 2

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In this paper, we review research on parental expectations and their effects on student achievement within and across diverse racial and ethnic groups. Our review suggests that the level of parental expectations varies by racial/ethnic group, and that students' previous academic performance is a less influential determinant of parental expectations among racial/ethnic minority parents than among European American parents. To explain this pattern, we identify three processes associated with race/ethnicity that moderate the relation between students' previous performance and parental expectations. Our review also indicates that the relation of parental expectations to concurrent or future student achievement outcomes is weaker for racial/ethnic minority families than for European American families. We describe four mediating processes by which high parental expectations may influence children's academic trajectories and show how these processes are associated with racial/ethnic status. The article concludes with a discussion of educational implications as well as suggestions for future research.

Parental Educational Expectations and Academic Achievement in Children and Adolescents—a Meta-analysis

A longitudinal study on the impact of parental academic support and expectations on students’ academic achievement: the mediating role of happiness

Parental involvement and adolescents’ educational success: the roles of prior achievement and socioeconomic status.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

The role of parental expectations in affecting children's academic progress has received substantial attention from psychologists and sociologists over the past half century. In general, parental expectations have been found to play a critical role in children's academic success. Students whose parents hold high expectations receive higher grades, achieve higher scores on standardized tests, and persist longer in school than do those whose parents hold relatively low expectations (Davis-Kean 2005 ; Pearce 2006 ; Vartanian et al. 2007 ). High parental expectations are also linked to student motivation to achieve in school, scholastic and social resilience, and aspirations to attend college (Hossler and Stage 1992 ; Peng and Wright 1994 ; Reynolds 1998 ). Furthermore, parents' academic expectations mediate the relation between family background and achievement, and high parental expectations also appear to buffer the influence of low teacher expectations on student achievement (Benner and Mistry 2007 ; Zhan 2005 ).

While most of the research conducted to date has been cross-sectional, a few longitudinal studies offer particularly powerful evidence that parental expectations are a causal determinant of student expectations and academic outcomes (Rutchick et al. 2009 ; Trusty et al. 2003 ). Additionally, two meta-analyses have found that parental expectations are the strongest family-level predictor of student achievement outcomes, exceeding the variance accounted for by other parental beliefs and behaviors by a substantial margin (Jeynes 2005 , 2007 ).

For the most part, scholarly inquiry on parental expectations has focused on European American, middle-class samples, and theoretical formulations have typically not attempted to account for the context of race or ethnicity in shaping parental expectations or the academic outcomes associated with them. Only within the last few decades have researchers attempted to include diverse ethnic and racial groups in their samples. In recent years, several large studies have included a measure of parental expectations including the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). As we will argue presently, these and other studies find significant racial/ethnic variation in (a) the level of parental expectations, (b) the role of students' academic performance in determining parental expectations, and (c) the effect of parental expectations on student outcomes. The goal of this review is to conduct a thorough review of these studies and take a fresh look at the way in which parental expectations are formed and communicated to children in a variety of sociocultural contexts.

Our analysis of racial and ethnic differences in the formation and effects of parental expectations draws from a sociocultural approach to parenting pioneered by anthropologists Beatrice and John Whiting, along with their colleagues and former students (e.g., Harkness and Super 2002 ; LeVine et al. 1994 ; Weisner 2002 ; Whiting and Edwards 1988 ; Whiting and Whiting 1975 ). Within this perspective, parents in a society are thought to develop goals and care strategies (i.e., cultural models) that maximize the likelihood that children will attain culturally valued skills and characteristics. Parents are seen as rational actors who use their shared knowledge of the world to adapt and make complex decisions in their local community. The likelihood of a particular parent adopting the norms that have been formulated within a cultural scene is dependent on individual characteristics of the parent (e.g., personality, health status) but parents are also viewed as existing within cultural scenes that include macro-structural elements and institutions (e.g., political and economic systems).

Although cultural models of child rearing and education are collectively constructed by members of a community, this does not mean that they necessarily emerge at the level of a national, ethnic, or racial group, nor do all members of a group necessarily agree with dominant cultural models (Gjerde 2004 ). To understand why a parent acts the way she does, it is essential to identify the models that are available to members of a certain community but also to acknowledge “individuals' self-consciousness, individuality, and ability to transcend their own culture” (Gjerde 2004 , p. 140).

The implications of this sociocultural perspective for our review of the extant literature are that we (a) will be alert to the likelihood that parents' expectations about their children's schooling will be partially dependent on their racial or ethnic heritage; (b) will examine the linkages of the social economic context to parental expectations; and (c) will explore the culturally based beliefs that parents have about their own role and the role of those in important institutions such as the schools. This perspective will also guide the questions we seek to explore in future work, which are discussed in the final section of this review.

Defining Parental Expectations

Although the term “parental expectations” has been defined in various ways in the literature, most researchers characterize parental expectations as realistic beliefs or judgments that parents have about their children's future achievement as reflected in course grades, highest level of schooling attained, or college attendance (e.g., Alexander et al. 1994 ; Glick and White 2004 ; Goldenberg et al. 2001 ). Parental expectations are based on an assessment of the child's academic capabilities as well as the available resources for supporting a given level of achievement. Most researchers operationalize parental expectations by asking parents “how far” they think their child will go in school or by asking them to forecast what grades a child will receive that year (see Table 1 ). Occasionally, researchers have also asked about student perceptions of parental expectations as a proxy for parental expectations themselves (e.g., Gill and Reynolds 1999 ).

Parental expectations can be contrasted with parental aspirations, which typically refer to desires, wishes or goals that parents have formed regarding their children's future attainment rather than what they realistically expect their children to achieve (Seginer 1983 ). To the extent that parental aspirations reflect the value parents place on education, they are based on parents' personal goals as well as community norms about schooling and its role in promoting professional and personal success (Astone and McLanahan 1991 ; Carpenter 2008 ). Researchers tend to measure parental aspirations by asking the year of schooling parents “want” or “hope” their children to achieve (Aldous 2006 ; Goldenberg et al. 2001 ).

Although parental aspirations and expectations are conceptually distinct, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably (e.g., Fan and Chen 2001 ; Juang and Silbereisen 2002 ; Mau 1995 ). On occasion, researchers assess parental aspirations and expectations separately but combine them into a single measure for analytic purposes (e.g., Bandura et al. 1996 ). In this review, we focus exclusively on studies that measured parental expectations about their children’s future academic achievement. In order to locate relevant work, we first conducted a computer-based literature search of the PsycINFO and ERIC databases using the key phrase “parent[al] expectation” and “achievement.” We restricted our search to peer-reviewed articles published in journals in or after 1990. We then took an “ancestry approach,” examining the references sections of relevant articles to identify relevant articles that had not emerged in the computer search. In the process of reviewing articles, we excluded studies that (a) measured parents' aspirations concerning their children's educational achievement rather than parental expectations, (b) examined children with cognitive disabilities, and (c) focused on parental expectations concerning students' non-academic outcomes such as occupational attainment.

This process resulted in the identification of 33 articles reporting on studies that assessed parental expectations concerning their children's academic achievement and two meta-analyses (see Table 1 for an overview). In 18 of these articles the authors contrasted the expectations of parents in two or more racial/ethnic groups or examined the relation between parental expectations and students' academic performance in two or more groups.

In this paper, we refer to race as well as to ethnicity, which can be defined as an individual's heritage based on nationality, language and/or culture (Betancourt and Lopez 1993 ). A variety of terms have been employed to denote racial/ethnic groups in the studies that we reviewed; for consistency, we use the following terms to refer to these groups within the USA: African American, Asian American, Latino, and European American.

Evidence of Racial/Ethnic Differences in Parental Expectations

We found 14 reports that contrasted the expectations of parents in two or more groups. Of the eight articles that contrasted Asian parents with those in other groups, seven found that Asian American parents tend to hold higher expectations than do parents in other racial groups (Glick and White 2004 ; Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ; Okagaki and Frensch 1998 ; Peng and Wright 1994 ; Suizzo and Stapleton 2007 ; Sy et al. 2005 ; Vartanian et al. 2007 ). For example, a study by Peng and Wright ( 1994 ) drawing upon the NELS data found that 80% of Asian American parents of eighth graders expected their children to attain at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 50% of Latino parents, 58% of African American parents, and 62% of European American parents. Four of these eight articles tested whether Asian parents' high expectations held up after controlling for parental socioeconomic status, and all of these found that they did (Glick and White 2004 ; Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ; Suizzo and Stapleton 2007 ; Sy et al. 2005 ).

Findings pertaining to the expectations of Latino and African Americans relative to other groups are somewhat inconsistent. In four studies, Latino parents expressed significantly lower expectations than one or more other groups (Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ; Okagaki and Frensch 1998 ; Peng and Wright 1994 ; Vartanian et al. 2007 ), but one recent analysis using the ECLS-K data found that Latinos had higher expectations for their kindergarteners than African American and European American parents after controlling for maternal education, family income and maternal depression (Suizzo and Stapleton 2007 ). Two articles found that African American parents held significantly higher expectations than European American parents after controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) (Glick and White 2004 ; Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ), while one study reported no significant difference between the two groups after SES was controlled (Suizzo and Stapleton 2007 ).

In summary, it appears likely that Asian American parents hold higher expectations than do parents in other groups, but it is difficult to draw a definitive conclusion regarding the relative expectations of African American, Latino, and European American parents. As we will discuss presently, it is likely that these inconsistent findings are partially attributable to differences across studies in the child’s age at the time parental expectations were assessed, the way in which parental expectations were elicited, variability across racial/ethnic groups in family SES, and the tendency of most studies to compare large and heterogeneous categories (e.g., Latino) rather than more well-defined subgroups. We believe that, in addition to these methodological issues, it is also time to develop more nuanced theory pertaining to the factors predicting parental expectations as well as the processes by which parental expectations exert an effect on children's academic outcomes.

What Are the Predictors of Parental Expectations?

One of the central questions that theory needs to address is why there are racial/ethnic group differences with respect to parental expectations. In the past, theory and research on the determinants of parental expectations have not tended to focus on cultural explanations. Sociologists tend to rely on early theoretical work proposing that membership in a certain social class gives rise to a particular level of parental expectations which in turn affect students' educational and occupational attainment ( e.g. , Sewell et al. 1969 ). Psychologists, in contrast, more often draw from a comprehensive model developed by Seginer ( 1983 ) that pinpoints intra-individual and school factors contributing to the formation of parental expectations. In particular, Seginer underscores the importance of feedback from the school about previous academic performance in shaping parental expectations about their children's future, along with parental estimates of students' intellectual ability and parents' aspirations for children's achievement.

Recent findings of relatively strong ethnic/racial differences in parental expectations suggest that neither social class nor intra-individual factors offer a complete explanation for the formation of parental expectations. In particular, they cast doubt on the role of previous performance as a predictor of parental expectations for all racial/ethnic groups. For example, in a study of South African parents' expectations about the long-term attainment of their 11th grade children, parental expectations were related to literacy/numeracy scores in eighth grade for “Whites” but not for “Blacks,” after controlling for parents' education (Beutel and Anderson 2008 ). Similar findings emerged in the USA, where Hossler and Stage ( 1992 ) found that minority parents had higher educational expectations than European American parents even though the GPAs of their ninth graders were lower than those of European Americans.

The relation between previous school performance and parental expectations is not similar across SES groups either. In two studies, the gap between previous academic performance and parental expectations for marks was larger for lower income families than for their higher income counterparts (Alexander et al. 1994 ; Balboni and Pedrabissi 1998 ). For example, in their longitudinal study, Alexander and colleagues ( 1994 ) found that, while parents' expectations for their early elementary children's grades in reading and math were above the children's actual grades regardless of ethnicity and SES, the gap between actual grades and expected grades was larger for lower SES parents. The gap between parental expectations and children's grades was also larger for African American than European American parents.

To help explain these findings, we propose three factors that might dilute the power of past performance as a determinant of parental expectations: parents’ belief that effort rather than ability affects school performance; a lack of understanding or mistrust of feedback from the school about their children's performance; and low self-efficacy in supporting their children's future schoolwork (see Fig. 1 ). We suggest that these moderating factors are associated with membership in a particular racial/ethnic group. By pinpointing the explanatory factors, we are able to move beyond a “social address” comparison of racial/ethnic groups to develop a more process-oriented account of racial/ethnic differences (Bronfenbrenner 1986 ).

Moderators between students' previous performance and parental expectations

Parents' belief in effort as the primary determinant of school performance

Parental attributions about the causes of successful school performance are likely to affect the relation between students' prior performance and parents' expectations about future performance. Parents who attribute achievement outcomes primarily to ability or intelligence expect performance to be stable because ability tends to be viewed as a stable entity that is difficult for the individual to change (Weiner 2005 ). For parents with this belief system, past performance is likely to be seen as a reliable indicator of future attainment. Those who believe that students' effort—a more controllable and unstable commodity—is the primary cause of achievement are more likely to think that future performance can potentially be different from that of the past if the student changes the amount of effort they put into their schoolwork.

It has been clearly established that there are cultural differences in parents' views about the factors that contribute to high achievement. Asian American parents are particularly likely to view academic success as a function of motivation and hard work rather than innate ability (Okagaki and Frensch 1998 ). International comparisons have also highlighted the tendency of Asian parents to emphasize the effect of effort more than innate ability on academic learning (Holloway 1988 ; Stevenson and Stigler 1992 ). This tendency of Asian and Asian American parents to focus on effort may contribute to a weaker relation between past performance and parental academic expectations for these groups because they believe that their children can always improve their performance at school by putting forth more effort, regardless of their previous level of attainment.

Additionally, various sociocultural groups may differ in the way they conceptualize academic ability itself. On one hand, European American parents tend to view academic ability primarily as a composite of analytic and verbal abilities (Okagaki and Sternberg 1993 ). In contrast, racial/ethnic minority parents perceive other factors – including motivation, self-management, and social competence—as contributing to high achievement. For example, Mexican immigrant parents more often perceive that morals, social skills and academic attainment are inseparable, and Vietnamese and Filipino immigrant parents view motivation as an aspect of ability or intelligence (Delgado-Gaitan 1992 ; Goldenberg and Gallimore 1995 ; Okagaki and Sternberg 1993 ; Valdés 1996 ). And because motivational and personal qualities are somewhat more subject to the control of the individual than are more basic cognitive skills, parents to whom they are salient may feel more optimistic about the chance of improvement, whereas parents who focus solely on cognitive skills may be more likely to hypothesize that future performance will not depart strongly from past performance.

There is also some evidence that these variable definitions of the components of academic ability are associated with parents' educational experiences, with more highly educated parents more likely to view ability as independent of social skills and motivation to achieve. In a study of Finnish families, Räty and colleagues ( 2002 ) found that highly educated parents tended to form expectations for their 7-year olds based on the children's cognitive competence in literacy and other academic subjects as well as their analytic problem solving skills, whereas vocationally trained parents were more likely to form expectations based on their children’s creativity and social skills.

In sum, it appears likely that variability in how parents from different social class and sociocultural backgrounds interpret the causes of children’s performance may explain culturally specific patterns in the relation between prior academic performance and parental expectations. If future studies include parental attributions as a moderator of the relation between parental expectations and students' prior academic performance, we will gain a clearer understanding of the processes affecting student response to parental expectations in different racial/ethnic groups.

Parents' differential understanding and trust of school feedback

In order for students' past performance to figure into parental expectations about the future, parents must rely on feedback from the school in the form of grades, test results, and teachers' assessments (Goldenberg et al. 2001 ; Seginer 1983 ). However, parents' assessment of children's performance differs depending on the sociocultural group to which the parents belong. For example, Alexander et al. ( 1994 ) found racial and SES differences in parents’ attentiveness to performance feedback from the elementary school. They found that recall of previous year’s marks in reading and math was more accurate among European American than African American parents, as well as among high-SES parents rather than low-SES parents. As noted earlier, parental expectations for future marks were closer to actual marks among European American than African American, and were closer among high-SES parents than their low-SES counterparts. For example, while approximately 25% of European American and African American parents expected their children to receive excellent marks, 1.5% of African American children actually received marks of this caliber, as compared with 10.1% of European American children. These findings suggest that European American parents are more attuned to the feedback from school and take more account of previous performance in constructing their expectations than African American parents.

We argue that the degree to which parents recall and give weight to school feedback about a student's performance depends on the nature of the relationships that parents are able to construct with school staff. The relatively lower accuracy of grade recall among African American parents in the work of Alexander and colleagues ( 1994 ) may be a function of their relationship with teachers and other school staff. Due to the history of racial discrimination within the United States, African American parents are more likely to mistrust the intentions and doubt the fairness of teachers (Lareau and Horvat 1999 ; Ogbu 2003 ). If parents perceive teachers as biased or untrustworthy, they may be less likely to see teacher evaluation as a legitimate reflection of their child's potential. Mistrust may, therefore, attenuate the relation of past performance to future expectations for these parents. Conversely, parents who think teachers have accurately and fairly assessed their children's performance are more likely to use that evaluation as a basis for future predictions. For this reason, future research should include both teachers' and parents' assessment of student's performance, and, more importantly, should continue investigating the institutional as well as psychological and cultural factors that undermine or support the trust of parents from varied racial/ethnic groups.

Parents' variable self-efficacy regarding involvement in children's schooling

A third reason why prior performance may be a less potent predictor of school performance among racial/ethnic minority and lower SES parents is that these parents may lack a sense of efficacy in helping their children succeed in school in the future, particularly as the children move into the higher grades (Bandura 1982 , 1986 , 1997 ). Parents with limited education and fewer economic resources tend to feel less efficacious helping their children with school work than do more advantaged parents, and also feel less comfortable interacting with teachers and other education professionals (Coleman and Karraker 1997 ; Lareau 1989 ; Yamamoto 2007 ; Zhan 2005 ). These parents may develop low academic expectations for their children even when the children's previous school performance is relatively high if they worry that they will not be able to provide support in the future due to a lack of intellectual, cultural or material resources. Conversely, when parents believe that they are capable of helping their children succeed at school, they may retain high expectations concerning their academic performance (Bandura et al. 1996 ).

Parenting self-efficacy regarding the support of children's achievement is likely to be more strongly associated with a combination of ethnicity, immigrant status and SES than with race/ethnicity alone. Due to limited English proficiency, financial constraints, and limited experience with the educational system in the USA, immigrant parents often find it difficult to communicate and work with their children, and experience a lower parental sense of efficacy in helping children's schooling (Cooper et al. 1999 ; García Coll and Marks 2009 ; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001 ). Immigrant Latino parents are particularly “at risk” for experiencing a lack of efficacy with respect to schooling. While Asian immigrant parents are often available to draw on educational and financial resources within their community, Latino immigrant parents are more often on their own when it comes to support their children’s schooling (Zhou and Kim 2006 ). In one early study, Stevenson et al. ( 1990 ) found that immigrant Latino mothers' sense of efficacy in helping their children with reading and mathematics in elementary school was significantly lower than that of European American and African American mothers. Non-immigrant Latino parents feel more confident about their children's chances for success than do those of the immigrant generation; for example, Hao and Bonstead-Burns ( 1998 ) found that immigrant Mexican parents had lower expectations for their eighth grader's future schooling than did Mexican-heritage parents born in the USA.

Cultural models of parenting may also contribute to parents' perception that they can do little to promote high achievement in the future. Specifically, some evidence suggests that Latino parents of adolescents endorse a “child-directed” view that accords more of the decision-making power to the adolescent than the parent in selecting an educational path (Stanton-Salazar 2001 ). The question of what parents believe they should do and what they believe they can do to support their children's schooling thus depends on the role demands, stresses, and supports afforded by their cultural and socioeconomic background. To date, little work has examined parents' sense of efficacy in supporting their children's education as a moderator of the relation between students' performance and parental expectations. Future work in this area is warranted in order to better understand how immigrant and ethnic minority parents construct their educational expectations.

Evidence of an Association Between Parental Expectations and Students' Academic Achievement

We identified 21 articles examining the relation of parental expectations to student achievement including two reporting meta-analyses. In eight of these articles, researchers tested and found strong and consistent evidence of a positive association or significant pathways between parental expectations and achievement for European American families (Davis-Kean 2005 ; Entwisle and Alexander 1990 ; Neuenschwander et al. 2007 ; Okagaki and Frensch 1998 ; Pearce 2006 ; Peng and Wright 1994 ; Phillipson and Phillipson 2007 ; Sy and Schulenberg 2005 ). None of the studies that examined the association between parental expectations of European American families and children’s achievement failed to find an association. However, the findings were not consistent for Asian Americans or African Americans. On one hand, Okagaki and Frensch ( 1998 ) found that when SES and other parental involvement variables were controlled, a measure of parental expectations was a significant predictor of fourth and fifth graders' grades for European American and Asian American students. Similarly, Sy and Schulenberg ( 2005 ) conducted path analyses using the ECLS-K data and found that the pathways from parental expectations to kindergartners' achievement outcomes were similar for European American and Asian Americans. However, more recent research conducted by Vartanian and colleagues ( 2007 ) with 9,494 participants showed that parental expectations was a significant predictor of college completion for the non-Asians but not for Asian Americans after controlling for 8th grade GPA and standardized test scores. Davis-Kean ( 2005 ) studied 8 to 12-year-old children and found similar patterns with African Americans; parental expectations had a direct significant effect on academic achievement for European American but not for African American students.

With regard to Latino families, none of the studies we reviewed found a significant relation between parental expectations and student performance. The Okagaki and Frensch study ( 1998 ) described earlier found no evidence of an association between parental expectations and student grades for Latino students nor did two more recent longitudinal studies focusing on Latino immigrant families. A study by Goldenberg and colleagues ( 2001 ) assessed Latino families' parental expectations and their children's academic performance each year from kindergarten to sixth grade. Analyses conducted with a small sample of 57 found no significant paths from early parental expectations to later school performance (as measured by teacher ratings) or to reading and math test scores. Similar results emerged from a large study of 1,050 Latino immigrant students and families, which found that parental expectations assessed when children were 10th graders were not related to children's math achievement at 12th grade (Carpenter 2008 ).

These inconsistent findings raise questions about the mechanisms through which parental expectations exert an effect on students' educational processes. It is possible that parental expectations influence student's academic outcomes through a variety of mechanisms, some of which are more powerful for a particular racial/ethnic group. We have identified four such mechanisms linked to high parental expectations: (a) child's internalization of parents’ valuation of achievement; (b) child’s higher competency beliefs; (c) more intensive and effective parental involvement; and (d) more optimistic and positive teacher perceptions of child's capabilities (see Fig. 2 ). We now turn to the evidence for each of these mechanisms, and discuss the reasons why a particular mechanism may function differently for racial/ethnic minority families than for European American families.

Mediators between parental expectations and students' academic outcomes

High parental expectations indicate that parents value achievement

Parental expectations can function as a form of communication that conveys to students the value their parents place on achievement. Students perceive this communicated value as a norm, which becomes internalized as a standard that students strive to attain. The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy was introduced by early sociologists who argued that parents' prophecy—or expectations—about future achievement boosts their children's motivation and expectations, and in turn leads them to high achievement (Haller and Portes 1973 ; Reitzes and Mutran 1980 ; Rosenthal 1974 ). Dumais ( 2006 ) extended this notion by characterizing student perceptions of parental expectations as the internalization of a social structure that “forms one's worldview and serves as a guide throughout an individual’s life” (p.85). Psychologists have proposed a similar notion, describing parents as “expectancy socializers” (Eccles et al. 1982 ) and focusing on the ways in which parental expectations function as an “environmental press” that compels students to meet parental standards (Marjoribanks 1972 ).

To investigate the possible operation of this “internalization of norms” mechanism, we examined those studies that assessed the relation between parental expectations and students' own expectations or aspirations. This motivational function of parental expectations is supported by eight articles demonstrating a strong association between parental expectations and students' expectations or aspirations (Benner and Mistry 2007 ; Beutel and Anderson 2008 ; Carpenter 2008 ; Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ; Rutchick et al. 2009 ; Smith-Maddox 2000 ; Trusty 2002 ; Trusty et al. 2003 ). A recent longitudinal study of 884 children aged 6 to 13 years when the study began demonstrated the long-lasting effect of parental expectations on children's expectations. The authors found that parental expectations were closely related to students' expectations 5 years later even after controlling for demographic variables and children's previous achievement scores. Parental expectations also influenced their children’s later achievement scores via the mediating effect of children’s expectations (Rutchick et al. 2009 ).

In three of these studies, there was evidence that the strength of the linkage between parents' expectations and students' expectations differed across racial/ethnic groups (Beutel and Anderson 2008 ; Carpenter 2008 ; Hao and Bonstead-Burns 1998 ). Carpenter ( 2008 ) noted that correlations between parental expectations and expectations of 10th to 12th graders were weaker for Latino students with an immigrant parent compared with non-Latino students with an immigrant parents. Beutel and Anderson ( 2008 ) found that South African parents' expectations when their children were in the 8th grade was a significant predictor of students' educational expectations at 11th grade for Asian and mixed race students but not for Blacks after controlling for parents' education, previous literacy/numeracy scores, and whether or not the student was enrolled in school at the time of 11th grade.

What may account for this pattern of weaker relations between parental and student expectations for racial/ethnic minorities than for European American families? One explanation may be related to variability across families in the degree to which parents and children communicate about schooling. For immigrant families, it may be more difficult to communicate clearly about schooling because parents are less familiar with the US educational system. Additionally, relations between immigrant parents and their children can be affected by language difficulties and other elements of acculturative stress (García Coll and Marks 2009 ; Qin et al. 2008 ). Hao and Bonstead-Burns ( 1998 ) analyzed Asian and Mexican immigrant and native-born Mexican American, African American, and European American eighth graders' expectations in relation to their parents' expectations. They found high agreement between parents and children within Asian immigrant families, but not within Mexican immigrant families. In general, parents who participated in more frequent discussions with their children and were more involved in their children's educational activities were more likely to hold similar expectations to their children than those reporting less frequent interactions.

Parents in some racial/ethnic groups may be particularly explicit in their communication of academic expectations. One qualitative study of low-income ninth grade Asian American students found that parents of these students tended to articulate their educational expectations quite strongly and forcefully, leaving no doubt regarding the high value they placed on achievement (Li et al. 2008 ). In contrast, it appears that Mexican immigrant parents also view education as important but are less likely to communicate their views to their children in an emphatic manner. Early evidence regarding this distinction emerged in a study of Japanese and Mexican immigrant families conducted by Matute-Bianchi ( 1986 ), which found that Mexican parents were less likely than the Japanese parents to discuss their academic expectations with their children (see also Stanton-Salazar 2001 ).

High parental expectations boost student academic self-efficacy

Another way in which parental expectations may affect student achievement is by conveying messages about their child's abilities and capabilities which in turn enhance students’ competency beliefs and sense of efficacy about their academic trajectory (Eccles et al. 1982 ; Eccles et al. 1998 ). In general, students who perceive themselves as capable tend to obtain better grades and higher test scores than students with lower capability beliefs. For example, the mediating role of students' competency beliefs emerged in a comparative study of sixth and seventh grade students in the USA and Switzerland (Neuenschwander et al. 2007 ). Path analyses indicated that parental expectations influenced early adolescents' self-concept of ability which in turn affected their grades and standardized scores in math and native language.

Studies of students in racial/ethnic minority groups suggest that parental expectations also appear to be related to academic self-efficacy among African American and Latino students. A study conducted by Benner and Mistry ( 2007 ) tested the mediating role of student competency beliefs among 522 youth aged 9–16 years old, most of whom were African Americans and Latinos from low-income families. Path analyses demonstrated that maternal expectations were associated with students' perceptions of their academic skills and ability to learn new concepts in math and reading. These self-perceptions were in turn related to achievement test scores and parental ratings of academic performance (but not teacher evaluations of academic performance).

Evidence regarding the mediating role of academic self-efficacy among Asian American students is scarce, but a study by Eaton and Dembo ( 1997 ) found that, on average, Asian American ninth graders had lower academic self-efficacy beliefs but higher achievement behaviors compared to non-Asian American students, suggesting that academic self-efficacy may not be responsible for the high achievement of this group. Correlations indicated that fear of failure was significantly associated with academic achievement for the Asian American students, but that self-efficacy beliefs were not.

These findings are consistent with a cultural pattern of self-criticism that has been noted in Asian countries (e.g., Holloway 2010 ; Lewis 1995 ). To the extent that Asian American students are encouraged to remediate their weaknesses rather than dwell on their accomplishments, the mediating role of student competency beliefs would function differently for these students than for those in other groups. In the future, it would be of interest to conduct studies examining the mediating role of academic competency or self-efficacy beliefs among Asian American students. Such studies will increase our understanding of the pathway through which parental expectations increase students' academic outcomes for this group.

High parental expectations foster parental involvement in schooling

Another pathway by which parental expectations are thought to affect student achievement is by fostering greater parental involvement in children's academic activities. Parental involvement in children's education generally refers to the extent and quality of help with homework, communication with the teacher, participation in school activities, and facilitation of cognitively stimulating activities (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1997 ; Sy and Schulenberg 2005 ; Trusty 2002 ). The relation of parental involvement to children’s academic achievement is well documented (see Pomerantz et al. 2007 for a review). Additionally, parental involvement has been found to affect students’ achievement-related beliefs, including their perceived competence and aspirations regarding academic achievement (Grolnick and Slowiaczek 1994 ). Of particular relevance to this review is evidence suggesting that parents who placed higher value on education and have higher expectations about their child's educational attainment tend to be more engaged in achievement-related activities, including reading to their children, sending them to extracurricular lessons, and monitoring their academic progress (Halle et al. 1997 ; Sy et al. 2005 ).

Yet, several studies have found variability across different groups in terms of the ways in which parents become involved in their children's schooling. For example, Peng and Wright’s ( 1994 ) analysis of the NELS data demonstrated that Asian American students had significantly higher parental expectations and achievement scores than Latino, African American and European American students. Yet, the Asian American parents were significantly less likely to discuss their children's school experiences with them, nor did they assist their children with their school work as much as did African American or European American parents. Compared with African American and Latino parents, Asian American parents provided more learning opportunities in the form of after-school lessons and activities, and disciplined their children to spend longer hours doing homework than African American, Latino, or European American parents. Thus, it is also crucial to recognize that various ethnic groups differ in the extent to which they engage in particular kinds of parental involvement.

Studies also highlight the powerful role of parental involvement as a mediator between parental expectations and students' academic outcomes for European American parents, but not for Asian American parents. Research conducted to date suggests that parental help with children's homework yields little positive influence on Asian American and Asian immigrant students' academic achievement even though such involvement appears to boost European American students' educational performance. In their analysis of the ECLS-K data on 514 Asian American and 7,857 European American kindergartners, Sy and Schulenberg ( 2005 ) found that for Asian parents, low parental expectations appeared to trigger parental involvement in school activities while for European American parents, high expectations prompted parental involvement. Furthermore, while the authors found that parental expectations and involvement predicted child outcomes in both groups, there were some differences in the pattern of effects. Specifically, parents' school participation was not significantly associate with Asian American student's math and reading scores, even though it was for European American children. For both groups, parents' involvement in home literacy was associated with children's reading outcomes, and for European Americans but not Asian Americans it was associated with math outcomes.

There is little evidence regarding the association of parental expectations to parental involvement among Latino families. However, research conducted to date suggests that Latino parents are less likely than European Americans to become involved in certain kinds of supportive activities with their children. For example, Latino parents are significantly less likely to read to their young children than are European American parents (Bradley et al. 2001 ; Raikes et al. 2006 ). To a large extent, this pattern may be a function of language barriers, low levels of schooling, and lack of knowledge about American education among Latino immigrants (Cooper et al. 1999 ; García Coll et al. 2002 ). Culturally bounded beliefs about the parental role may also have an effect. Several studies have found that Latino parents with young children view their primary role as one of guiding their children's moral development and protecting them from negative peer influences rather than providing direct support of academic learning (Cooper 2002 ; Cooper et al. 1999 ; Holloway et al. 1997 ; Valdés 1996 ). If Latino parents are generally less likely to provide certain forms of support concerning achievement, then such support is unlikely to serve as a mediator linking parental expectations to student achievement. These factors all help explain why parental involvement is not a strong mediator between parental expectations and student achievement for all groups, but the evidence is sparse, particularly with respect to groups other than Asian Americans.

High parental expectations and involvement increase teachers' expectations of students

A final route through which parental expectations may increase students' academic success is by influencing teachers' perceptions and evaluations of the child. Teachers may find it motivating to pay particular attention to children whose parents hold high expectations and are clearly involved in their children's schooling because the teachers believe that their efforts in the classroom are being reinforced at home. Teachers who perceive parents as holding high expectations for their children may also raise their own expectations for those particular students and increase their educational commitment to them (Bandura et al. 1996 ).

Lareau ( 1989 ) provides a detailed view of the way in which parental expectations are perceived by teachers and used in making educational decisions about children. In her ethnographic study of working class and middle class families, she found that decisions to promote a child to the next grade depended on the teacher's perception of parental involvement. Low-achieving students whose parents appeared to be involved in their children's schooling were likely to be promoted, while similarly challenged students whose parents were not perceived as involved were required to repeat the year. While Lareau's study did not examine ethnic/racial differences, her work showed that teachers tended to view parents of lower SES as less involved than those of higher SES backgrounds. In a quantitative study of kindergarten children and their parents, Dumais ( 2006 ) found that lower SES parents tended to feel less welcome at the school than did higher SES parents, and these perceptions were in turn associated with lower teacher perceptions regarding their children's academic skills.

There is ample evidence that teachers treat students differently depending on their expectations of the students. When teachers hold high academic expectations for a student, they are likely to provide a more positive and challenging learning environment for that individual. In her qualitative study of elementary school students, Weinstein ( 2002 ) found that teachers were more likely to praise students of whom they held high expectations, ask them to lead classroom activities, and give them more academic choices. On the other hand, teachers provided negative feedback to students, of whom they held low expectations, giving them limited attention and recommending placement in low-track classes. Interviews conducted with the children revealed how they came to perceive their academic competence as it was reflected in the eyes of their teachers (see also Benner and Mistry 2007 ).

Even when parents are attempting to support their children's schooling, teachers may not realize that this is the case, or may view such effort as detrimental rather than supportive of student achievement. For example, in their qualitative study examining parental involvement in children's schooling, Lareau and Horvat ( 1999 ) found that teachers may discount or misinterpret the concerns of African American parents about racial discrimination in the classroom, thereby missing an opportunity to understand a potentially important explanation for a child’s failure to achieve. In short, “cultural mismatches” may cause teachers to de-value or misunderstand parental goals and actions, and may result in inaccurate expectations on the part of the teacher about the students’ potential. If this is the case, the relation between parental involvement and student achievement is not likely to be as strong for racial/ethnic minority parents as for their European American counterparts. At this point, evidence is only suggestive concerning the pathway from parental expectations and involvement to teacher expectations and involvement with students from various racial/ethnic groups, and the topic deserves further study.

Summary and Conclusions

The goal of this review was to examine the available evidence concerning the association between parental expectations and students' academic performance across diverse racial/ethnic groups. We found evidence that parental expectations are higher among Asian American families than other racial/ethnic groups. The evidence regarding educational expectations of Latino and African American families is somewhat mixed and merits further investigation. We also found that, while students’ prior academic performance is one of the strongest predictors of parental expectations among European American families, it is not a particularly strong predictor for racial/ethnic minority families.

To explain this pattern, we identified three factors that moderate the relation of previous performance to parental expectations about the future and that are likely to be associated with membership in a racial/ethnic minority group. We argued that parents who believe that effort is the key determinant of academic success are not likely to base their expectations on past performance because effort is relatively controllable and hence less stable over time. In contrast, those parents who believe that performance is a function of native ability, which is frequently perceived as relatively stable over time, are more likely to see past achievement as a reliable indicator of future performance. To the extent that Asian Americans are particularly likely to focus on the role of effort in achievement, the effects of past performance are likely to be less salient for them in predicting future performance than for other groups.

Second, parents' own experiences with school institutions and their perceptions of how school personnel treat members of their ethnic or cultural group affect the degree to which parents accept teachers' assessment of their children's school progress. Mistrust of teachers among minority or low-SES parents, especially among African American parents, may lessen parents' reliance on school feedback when evaluating their children's academic performance, and thus diminish its value in predicting how the child will do in the future. And third, parents' sense of self-efficacy in supporting their children's schooling is conditioned by available resources and sources of support. Parents with limited resources and support, especially low-SES and/or immigrant parents, may underestimate the likelihood of their children's future academic success even when past performance has been high because they do not feel personally capable of helping their children attain the required skills.

Our review also suggested that parental expectations are strongly related to student performance among European American families, but less so among minority families. To explain this pattern, we addressed four processes through which parental expectations influence children's academic trajectories: (a) raising student motivation; (b) instilling higher student competency beliefs; (c) stimulating greater parental involvement; and (d) increasing teachers' expectations of student promise. Our review suggests that these processes do not occur in the same way or to the same degree in all racial/ethnic groups. We showed how communication difficulties or other problems in the parent-child relationship, which is sometimes conditioned by ethnic background and immigrant status, may diminish the motivational effect of high parental expectations. Additionally, it appears that Asian American parents may more forcefully articulate their expectations, which may make it more likely that students will understand and internalize them.

We also suggested that for some groups, particularly Asian Americans, student beliefs about their academic competence may not be as strongly determinative of achievement as for other groups. As we noted, more studies examining students' competency beliefs across ethnic groups are necessary in order to compare the importance of this belief as a mediator between parental expectations and student outcomes. Regarding the association between parental expectations and their involvement in schooling, we reviewed work suggesting that for some groups, particularly Latinos, higher parental expectations did not necessarily translate into the type of parental involvement that is directly related to academic achievement. It is critical to have studies which investigate various types of parental involvement contributing to students’ academic achievement across diverse groups. And finally, we explored the possibility that teachers make academic decisions based on their perceptions of parental support, but may not always have a full understanding of the nature and effectiveness of that support. More quantitative research that includes teachers' perceptions about parental expectations and involvement in their children's schooling is necessary to test this model.

Directions for future research

In our review, we have tried to move beyond examination of ethnic and racial categories, which are at best proxies for complex and shifting sets of norms and social positions, by sketching out the interpersonal and intrapsychic processes by which parents in these various groups form and communicate their ideas. Consistent with a sociocultural perspective, we believe that this work should be extended in the future by conducting studies that take a nuanced view of cultural processes as shifting and contested responses to institutional structures and other features of the immediate context (Gjerde 2004 ). In so doing, researchers will obtain a deeper understanding of the dynamic processes by which family members interact with each other and with other actors in the home, school, and community (Weisner 2002 ).

We look forward to more studies that focus on the ways in which parental expectations emerge within the intertwined context of families' socio-economic position and their culturally constructed understandings. For example, to fill the gap in our knowledge about Latino families and schooling in the United States, it would be interesting to build from the pioneering work of Goldenberg et al. to explore the varied ways in which subgroups of Latino parents conceptualize their role and that of the teacher, and to learn how these culturally based perceptions play into their expectations about what their children can and will achieve in school (e.g., Goldenberg and Gallimore 1995 ; Goldenberg et al. 2001 ; Reese and Gallimore 2000 ). Additional qualitative work is needed to learn more about the ways Latino parents judge their ability to assist their children attain academic outcomes commensurate with their potential. We also need to learn more about whether and how parents reflect on the effects of their expectations on their children. What do they see, for example, as the motivational value of holding high expectations? Are they aware of or concerned about negative effects of inaccurate or unrealistic expectations? How do they balance their own perceptions of their children and those that they receive from teachers and other professionals? And finally, it will also be interesting to learn more about the ways that the mediators and moderators we have identified are related to each other within each racial/ethnic group and across groups. It is likely, for example, that parental involvement exerts an effect on academic achievement through more than one of the mediating processes we have identified. We have much more to learn about the ways that these various mechanisms may complement or even offset each other.

Additionally, we hope that a sociocultural approach can be applied more systematically across the age span. We were able to report on a number of studies involving 8th and 10th graders because of the availability of National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) data, but far fewer studies are available on children at other age periods. We found no studies that examined parental expectations of preschool children, for example. By conducting studies with parents of preschool-aged children we will be better able to identify when parents start to form their expectations, whether the relations between parental expectations and academic performance differ across ethnic groups at this young age, and if such patterns continue through adolescence.

More generally, we need additional longitudinal research that examines changes in parental expectations over time across and within ethnic groups. To date, the effects of parental expectations on children's academic achievement have typically been examined at a single point in time. This limits our understanding of the dynamic aspect of parental expectations, and their influence on their behavior and on their children’s educational trajectories. Careful study should focus on understanding what happens when students do not behave in accordance with parental expectations. What are the ways parents respond to unexpected developments and which are these associated with positive adaptation on the part of the children? Longitudinal study will also allow us to understand whether there are critical periods in which parental expectations are particularly likely to affect students' academic achievement.

There are a number of methodological concerns that deserve attention in future research. We have noted that sample size varies substantially across the studies conducted over the past two decades, with some earlier studies drawing from samples of fewer than 100 families to more recent large-scale studies with samples of 10,000 or more. Clearly, the small studies are somewhat hampered by low power to detect meaningful relationships. Even within larger data sets, the sample size often varies across ethnic groups, making it difficult to compare the strength of relations detected in within-group modeling exercises. As researchers increasingly turn their attention to inter-group comparisons, it is important that efforts are made to ensure a sample of adequate size for each focal group.

While the incorporation of parental expectations measures into large studies such as the NELS and ECLS-K certainly enables the researchers to engage in more powerful analyses, the cost of this practice is that such measures are typically quite short due to constraints of space and time. The compressed assessments possible in these very large data sets should be balanced with studies that delve more deeply into the assessment of parental expectations. At the least, researchers should consider measuring parents' grade expectations in addition to their expectations concerning their children's academic trajectory.

Although the number of studies including diverse racial/ethnic groups is growing, there is still a gap in our understanding of certain groups. As we have noted, the role of parental expectations in Latino families, especially in comparison with other racial/ethnic groups, is still poorly understood. To gain clarity with respect to these groups, future work should attend more carefully to the interactions among ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and immigrant status. While non-immigrant and immigrant families within the same ethnic group may share similar cultural beliefs, immigrant parents often face numerous challenges including limited English proficiency and a lack of knowledge about educational system in the USA due to their migration experiences. Studies that examine parental expectations from various socioeconomic strata or both immigrant and later-generation within the same ethnic group will help us understand whether the models we proposed are applicable to specific ethnic groups or are moderated by their socioeconomic or immigrant status. It would also be preferable to draw more focused samples in future studies rather than relying upon large and heterogeneous categories such as Asian and Latino.

Finally, it is necessary to note that a few studies suggest that academic pressure derived from high parent expectations can undermine children's psychological well-being and academic motivation (Agliata and Renk 2009 ; Luthar and Becker 2002 ). Academic pressure has been found to be a predictor of suicidal ideation and behavior among Asian adolescents (Ang and Huan 2006 ; Juon et al. 1994 ). As we have demonstrated, most studies focus on positive aspects of parental expectations on students’ educational processes rather than negative aspects. Understanding the processes through which expectations produce both positive and negative outcomes in diverse racial and ethnic groups will further extend our insight into the processes by which families serve as an important educational context for children.

Educational implications

It is possible to derive several implications for educational practice from the findings of this review. Our review suggests a need for teachers to obtain a clearer understanding of the beliefs that parents in various ethnic/racial groups hold concerning their children. For example, while many teachers may be aware of the high academic expectations held by Asian American parents, they may not understand how those expectations play out in terms of student performance. It is unlikely that teachers realize that parental expectations may be unrelated to students’ prior performance in this group, nor are they necessarily aware that parental expectations may not be linked to students' perception about their academic competence. Teachers who hold a clear and accurate understanding of the dynamic process by which parental expectations are formed and interpreted by children will be in a better position to assist their students in overcoming the effects of overly high or excessively low parental expectations.

Our review suggests that there is a great deal of variability in the academic expectations held by racial/ethnic minority parents other than Asian Americans. Currently, many teachers may have the erroneous impression that Latino and African American parents are uniformly less likely to value education or to hold high expectations for their children than do parents in other groups. Teachers can be discouraged from making assumptions about parental expectations based on their ethnic or racial background, and encouraged to become sensitive to cultural and ethnic values. Respecting parents’ heritage will also help teachers form trusting relationships with parents from racial/ethnic minority groups and work on communicating clearly with them about their children's academic performance. Pre-service or in-service teacher education programs can help teachers increase their understanding of cultural diversity.

Our reviews especially indicate the need for better communication between school personnel and racial/ethnic minority parents. Promoting open communication with parents and providing guidance about how to interpret grades and reports will help parents construct realistic expectations for their children and will raise their sense of self-efficacy in supporting them in school. Providing clear guidance to parents about how to support their children's academic progress at home will also increase their involvement in their children's education. As Hoover-Dempsey and her colleagues suggest (Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler 1997 ; Hoover-Dempsey et al. 2005 ), teacher invitation is one of the critical elements that facilitates parents' decisions to be involved in their children's education.

Our findings also suggest implications for parent education. First, studies suggest that for some parents there is a gap between students' previous academic performance and parental expectations about the future. Parents with unrealistic expectations about their children's future performance may have difficulty knowing what they can do to maximize their children's academic potential. Our review also brought renewed attention to the fact that some ethnic minority parents mistrust their children's teachers or may have difficulty communicating with them due to cultural and economic differences. Accurate assessment of their child's school progress and academic progress is necessary for parents to form realistic expectations concerning their children's academic future. To address the difficulty that some parents have in assessing their children's potential, it may be beneficial for schools to offer parent seminars or peer-group interventions that illustrate strategies for initiating contact with their children's teachers and developing trusting and supportive relationships with them.

Lastly, parents' expectations have to be communicated to their children and accepted by them in order for them to have an effect on children's internal standards and self-perceptions. Schools and other supportive organizations may be able to help parents reflect on the importance of communicating clear expectations to their children and the effects of these communications on their children's perceptions of academic self-efficacy.

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The authors would like to thank Melike Acar, Irenka Domínguez-Pareto, and Ayumi Nagase for their assistance with this project.

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Yamamoto, Y., Holloway, S.D. Parental Expectations and Children's Academic Performance in Sociocultural Context. Educ Psychol Rev 22 , 189–214 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9121-z

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Chapter 10: The Changing Family

10.2 sociological perspectives on the family, learning objective.

Summarize understandings of the family as presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories.

Sociological views on today’s families and their problems generally fall into the functional, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced in Chapter 1 “Understanding Social Problems” . Let’s review these views, which are summarized in Table 10.1 “Theory Snapshot” .

Table 10.1 Theory Snapshot

Social Functions of the Family

Recall that the functional perspective emphasizes that social institutions perform several important functions to help preserve social stability and otherwise keep a society working. A functional understanding of the family thus stresses the ways in which the family as a social institution helps make society possible. As such, the family performs several important functions.

First, the family is the primary unit for socializing children . No society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help socialize children from the time they are born.

One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family is the major unit through which socialization occurs.

Colleen Kelly – Kids Playing Monopoly Chicago – CC BY 2.0.

Second, the family is ideally a major source of practical and emotional support for its members. It provides them food, clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them love, comfort, and help in times of emotional distress, and other types of support.

Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction . All societies have norms governing with whom and how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born.

Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity . Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and so forth. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from their parents, while others face many obstacles because the social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Beyond discussing the family’s functions, the functional perspective on the family maintains that sudden or far-reaching changes in conventional family structure and processes threaten the family’s stability and thus that of society. For example, most sociology and marriage-and-family textbooks during the 1950s maintained that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family was the best arrangement for children, as it provided for a family’s economic and child-rearing needs. Any shift in this arrangement, they warned, would harm children and, by extension, the family as a social institution and even society itself. Textbooks no longer contain this warning, but many conservative observers continue to worry about the impact on children of working mothers and one-parent families. We return to their concerns shortly.

The Family and Conflict

Conflict theorists agree that the family serves the important functions just listed, but they also point to problems within the family that the functional perspective minimizes or overlooks altogether.

First, the family as a social institution contributes to social inequality. Because families pass along their wealth to their children, and because families differ greatly in the amount of wealth they have, the family helps reinforce existing inequality. As it developed through the centuries, and especially during industrialization, the family also became more and more of a patriarchal unit (since men made money working in factories while women stayed home), helping to reinforce men’s status at the top of the social hierarchy.

Second, the family can also be a source of conflict for its own members. Although the functional perspective assumes the family provides its members emotional comfort and support, many families do just the opposite and are far from the harmonious, happy groups depicted in the 1950s television shows. Instead, they argue, shout, and use emotional cruelty and physical violence. We return to family violence later in this chapter.

The conflict perspective emphasizes that many of the problems we see in today’s families stem from economic inequality and from patriarchy. The problems that many families experience reflect the fact that they live in poverty or near poverty. Money does not always bring happiness, but a dire lack of money produces stress and other difficulties that impair a family’s functioning and relationships. The Note 10.9 “Applying Social Research” box discusses other ways in which social class influences the family.

Conflict within a family also stems from patriarchy. Husbands usually earn more money than wives, and many men continue to feel that they are the head of their families. When women resist this old-fashioned notion, spousal conflict occurs.

Applying Social Research

Social Class and the Family

A growing amount of social science research documents social class differences in how well a family functions: the quality of its relationships and the cognitive, psychological, and social development of its children. This focus reflects the fact that what happens during the first months and years of life may have profound effects on how well a newborn prospers during childhood, adolescence, and beyond. To the extent this is true, the social class differences that have been found have troublesome implications.

According to sociologist Frank E. Furstenberg Jr., “steep differences exist across social classes” in mothers’ prenatal experiences, such as the quality of their diet and health care, as well as in the health care that their infants receive. As a result, he says, “children enter the world endowed unequally.” This inequality worsens after they are born for several reasons.

First, low-income families are much more likely to experience negative events , such as death, poor health, unemployment, divorce, and criminal victimization. When these negative events do occur, says Furstenberg, “social class affects a family’s ability to cushion their blow…Life is simply harder and more brutish at the bottom.” These negative events produce great amounts of stress; as Chapter 2 “Poverty” discussed, this stress in turn causes children to experience various developmental problems.

Second, low-income parents are much less likely to read and speak regularly to their infants and young children, who thus are slower to develop cognitive and reading skills; this problem in turn impairs their school performance when they enter elementary school.

Third, low-income parents are also less able to expose their children to cultural experiences (e.g., museum visits) outside the home, to develop their talents in the arts and other areas, and to otherwise be involved in the many nonschool activities that are important for a child’s development. In contrast, wealthier parents keep their children very busy in these activities in a pattern that sociologist Annette Lareau calls concerted cultivation . These children’s involvement in these activities provides them various life skills that help enhance their performance in school and later in the workplace.

Fourth, low-income children grow up in low-income neighborhoods, which often have inadequate schools and many other problems, including toxins such as lead paint, that impair a child’s development. In contrast, says Furstenberg, children from wealthier families “are very likely to attend better schools and live in better neighborhoods. It is as if the playing field for families is tilted in ways that are barely visible to the naked eye.”

Fifth, low-income families are less able to afford to send a child to college, and they are more likely to lack the social contacts that wealthier parents can use to help their child get a good job after college.

For all these reasons, social class profoundly shapes how children fare from conception through early adulthood and beyond. Because this body of research documents many negative consequences of living in a low-income family, it reinforces the need for wide-ranging efforts to help such families.

Sources: Bandy, Andrews, & Moore, 2012; Furstenberg, 2010; Lareau, 2010

Families and Social Interaction

Social interactionist perspectives on the family examine how family members and intimate couples interact on a daily basis and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies grounded in social interactionism give us a keen understanding of how and why families operate the way they do.

Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the degree to which they communicate successfully (Tannen, 2001). A classic study by Mirra Komarovsky (1964) found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about problems they were having, while husbands tended to be quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences are less common in middle-class families, where men are better educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts, but gender differences in communication still exist in these families. Another classic study by Lillian Rubin (1976) found that wives in middle-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-class families are more apt to say that ideal husbands are ones who do not drink too much and who go to work every day.

According to the symbolic interactionist perspective, family problems often stem from the different understandings, perceptions, and expectations that spouses have of their marriage and of their family. When these differences become too extreme and the spouses cannot reconcile their disagreements, spousal conflict and possibly divorce may occur (Kaufman & Taniguchi, 2006).

Key Takeaways

The family ideally serves several functions for society. It socializes children, provides practical and emotional support for its members, regulates sexual reproduction, and provides its members with a social identity.
Reflecting conflict theory’s emphases, the family may also produce several problems. In particular, it may contribute for several reasons to social inequality, and it may subject its members to violence, arguments, and other forms of conflict.
Social interactionist understandings of the family emphasize how family members interact on a daily basis. In this regard, several studies find that husbands and wives communicate differently in certain ways that sometimes impede effective communication.

For Your Review

As you think how best to understand the family, do you favor the views and assumptions of functional theory, conflict theory, or social interactionist theory? Explain your answer.
Do you think the family continues to serve the function of regulating sexual behavior and sexual reproduction? Why or why not?

Bandy, T., Andrews, K.M., & Moore, K.A. (2012). Disadvantaged families and child outcomes: The importance of emotional support for mothers . Washington, DC: Child Trends.

Furstenberg, F. E., Jr. (2010). Diverging development: The not-so-invisible hand of social class in the United States. In B. J. Risman (Ed.), Families as they really are (pp. 276–294). New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Kaufman, G., & Taniguchi, H. (2006). Gender and marital happiness in later life. Journal of Family Issues, 27 (6), 735–757.

Komarovsky, M. (1964). Blue-collar marriage . New York, NY: Random House.

Lareau, A. (2010). Unequal childhoods: Inequalities in the rhythms of daily life. In B. J. Risman (Ed.), Families as they really are (pp. 295–298). New York: W. W. Norton.

Rubin, L. B. (1976). Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Tannen, D. (2001). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation . New York, NY: Quill.

Adaptation of Social Problems: Continuity and Change. Provided by : University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. Project : eLearning Support Initiative. License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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A Sample of Family Household Rules

If you're like most parents, you may struggle to list your household rules off the top of your head. Although you know what behavior is acceptable (and what isn't), labeling your specific expectations may be a little tricky. That's why it's important to create a written list of household or family rules.

With a list of family rules, everyone in the family becomes clear about expected behavior, including what is allowed and what is not. Rules also help kids feel safe and secure. When your rules are clear, you'll be less likely to get into power struggles . Your child's attempts to say, "But, I didn't know!" won't be effective when you remind them of the list of household rules. Learn more about how to create family rules.

Tips for Creating Family Rules

Family rules should include the rules that everyone in the house is expected to follow, including parents. So don't include, “Bedtime is at 7 p.m.,” unless you also plan to go to bed at that time. Your household rules should also be specific to your family's needs and values.

You may also find that you need to revise your list from time to time. Work together as a family to problem-solve specific issues. For example, if you’re noticing that several family members aren’t picking up after themselves, talk about it and see what you can do to better enforce this rule. As your children grow and mature the behaviors you'll want to address will shift as well. Add new rules when necessary.

Sample List of Family Rules

A lengthy list of family rules could become too complicated and confusing, so aim to keep your list short and simple. Here is a sample list of household rules.

Treat People and Property With Respect

These rules may include:

Ask permission to borrow other people’s belongings.
Do not hurt anyone’s body (no hitting, pushing, or kicking).
Do not hurt anyone’s feelings (no yelling, put-downs, or name-calling).

Implement an immediate consequence if this rule gets broken. Time-out or loss of privileges can help kids learn to make better choices. This is a good rule for parents as well as kids as you need to model appropriate behavior and anger control.

Knock on Closed Doors Before Entering

Teach kids about privacy by establishing a rule about knocking on closed doors before entering. This can help reinforce the idea that you should respect other people's space.

Pick up After Yourself

Explain what it means to pick up after yourself. Tell your child to put her dishes in the dishwasher when she's done eating. Or explain that you expect your children to pick up their toys before they get out new toys. This rule enhances household safety and cleanliness and develops good habits for when your children will go on to live independently.

Electronics Curfew

Many families establish rules about electronics. While some families limit screen time to a couple of hours per day, others set rules about what time electronics need to be turned off. Setting a curfew for electronics before bedtime can help develop good sleep hygiene for both children and parents which enables you to get a better night's sleep for health.

Make Amends When You Hurt Someone

Teach kids to take responsibility for their behavior by creating a rule about how to respond if they’ve hurt someone. Sometimes an apology may be enough and at other times, you may need to institute restitution as a consequence.

Tell the Truth

Stressing the importance of honesty will only be effective if you role model the behavior. If you tell your kids to always tell the truth, but claim your 13-year-old is only 12 so you can get a lower-priced movie ticket, your words won’t be effective. Kids can’t tell the difference between “white lies” and other lies so if you’re going to stress the importance of honesty, show that you're honest.

Practice Good Dental and Body Hygiene

Washing hands, brushing teeth, and bathing must be done for good health. Establish these as a rule so your children develop good habits, and don't shirk them yourself.

Attend Family Meetings

Holding regularly scheduled family meetings can help you review the rules, talk about schedules, and make any changes as necessary. While some families may want to schedule a meeting once a week, other families may find that meeting once a month is plenty.

American Psychological Association. The serious business of play .

Spokane Regional Health District. Why rules are important .

By Amy Morin, LCSW Amy Morin, LCSW, is the Editor-in-Chief of Verywell Mind. She's also a psychotherapist, an international bestselling author of books on mental strength and host of The Verywell Mind Podcast. She delivered one of the most popular TEDx talks of all time.

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Impacts of family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement: The role of peer interaction quality and educational expectation gap

Associated data.

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study, this original data can be found here: http://ceps.ruc.edu.cn .

The current study uses a two-wave longitudinal survey to explores the influence mechanism of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement. The family environment is measured by parents and children’s reports, including family atmosphere, parent–child interaction, and family rules, to reveal the mediating effect of adolescents’ positive or negative peers between the family environment and academic achievement, and whether the gap between self- and parental educational expectation plays a moderating effect. This study uses the data of the China Education Panel Study (CEPS); the survey samples include 9,449 eighth-grade students (M age = 13.55 years, SD = 0.70), establishing a multilevel moderated mediating effect model. The results showed (1) the family environment and peer interaction quality can positively predict adolescents’ academic achievement. (2) Using the KHB test, peer interaction quality plays a partial mediating role in the process of family environment positively affecting academic achievement, and the mediating ratio is 27.5%. (3) The educational expectation gap moderates the effect of the family environment on academic achievement and also on peer interaction quality. Therefore, from the perspective of environment and important others, to correctly grasp the academic achievement of junior high school students in the process of socialization, it is necessary to recognize that the family environment, peer interaction quality, and educational expectation gap play an important role.

Introduction

The salient characteristic feature of junior high school students’ academic achievement is the systematic study and participation in various comprehensive practical activities to improve their knowledge and skills in preparation for their future development, including the perception of both students’ self-competence (reading, spelling, language, arithmetic) and school performance (daily ability, writing ability, school satisfaction, calligraphy ability) ( Chapman, 1988 ). Academic achievement in a narrow sense refers to students’ academic performance and course acceptance in school, while academic achievement in a broad sense refers to the knowledge, skills, and cognitive abilities that students acquire through certain teaching and training, both of which reflect the overall learning status and development of students ( Sacco, 1997 ). As the main manifestation of adolescents’ achievements in receiving school education, it is the goal of adolescents’ development in the student period, which is related to the success of adolescents’ future career opportunities. Some scholars focus on adolescents’ cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability ( Adams, 2021 ), prosocial behavior and problem behavior ( Karmakar, 2017 ; Padilla et al., 2018 ), social development ( Walters, 2013 ), and academic achievement ( Zhang et al., 2020 ) issues; a study found that knowledgeable and successful families are conducive to children’s non-cognitive ability and social development, and a good family atmosphere and a parent–child relationship contribute to the development of physical and mental health ( Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ; Obimakinde et al., 2019 ). Parents who communicate with their children, visit museums, or record daily activities can cultivate children’s information literacy, improve math and reading scores, and directly stimulate cognitive development ( Sibley and Dearing, 2014 ; Choe, 2020 ). Moreover, family socioeconomic status (SES), related developmental resources (including parental support, expectations, and reading resources), and students’ individual reading motivation (including reading engagement and reading confidence) also affect adolescents’ learning outcomes (including academic achievement, school grades, and reading competence) ( Mudrak et al., 2020 ).

With the increase in communication time between adolescent students and their peers, they gradually break away from their families to participate in peer interaction; peers have become another major field affecting their development ( Criss et al., 2016 ). The interpersonal relationship established by teenagers in the school field plays an essential role in their behavior development, cognitive ability, and academic performance, especially adolescents’ academic engagement or learning performance is influenced by friendship quality ( Sebanc et al., 2016 ), friends’ gain and loss ( Lessard and Juvonen, 2018 ), and peer personality ( Golsteyn et al., 2021 ) factors in peer groups. Reviewing the research on the influence of family and important others on students’ achievement, there are two main points of view: On the one hand, according to American psychologist Harris’ group socialization development theory, parents and peers are the main objects for adolescents to realize social dependence, and they advocate that individual development (physical and mental development, and academic performance) is affected by the two ‘independent systems’ inside and outside the family ( Harris, 1995 ). On the other hand, some scholars expressed that the influence of family members and peer groups on adolescents’ academic achievement was a kind of ‘mutual compensation’ ( Fukuoka and Hashimoto, 1997 ). Although considerable research has involved single factors in the family environment (including socioeconomic status, parental autonomy support, and parental involvement in education) ( Joussemet et al., 2005 ; Vasquez et al., 2016 ; Froiland and Worrell, 2017 ; Mudrak et al., 2020 ), important others, including teacher autonomy support, learning competition among students, and positive or negative learning behaviors of classmates, affect academic achievement ( Diseth and Samdal, 2014 ; Li et al., 2022 ; Qiu and Chai, 2022 ). A small number of studies have also introduced emotion regulation, adaptive competencies, and sense of autonomy at the individual level as mediating variables, and these influencing processes are different due to different grades and genders ( Liew et al., 2014 ; Qiu and Chai, 2022 ). However, from the beginning of junior high school, parents pay more attention to students’ academic achievement, and the time of students getting along with their peers in school is also significantly increased; much less is known about the role of peer relationships in the impact of family environment on academic achievement, and at the middle school stage, differences in educational expectations between parents and adolescents are constantly changing, which is particularly reflected in Chinese students. Therefore, this study is based on the academic achievement of Chinese adolescents; it is necessary to further study the internal relationship between the family environment and academic achievement by introducing the quality of peer interaction as a mediator and the factors of the gap between self- and parental educational expectations. This study seeks intervention measures from the factors of the quality of peer interaction and educational expectation gap, which will provide new ideas for improving the academic achievement of Chinese adolescents.

Literature review and hypotheses

Family environment and academic achievement.

The family environment is the sum of physical and psychological conditions, which carries the development of individual personality and behavior, among which family relations and parent–child interaction are its important components, affecting children’s academic achievement, character quality, and the expression of psychological modeling functions ( Wilder, 2014 ; Krauss et al., 2020 ). According to the family systems theory, the family is composed of several subsystems, which are interconnected and mutually constrained to make the whole family function well, and the better the coordination of the family system, the better the psychological shape and academic performance of the members ( Miller et al., 1985 ). Leung and Shek (2016) divided family functioning into five dimensions: family members’ relationship, communication and adaptation, conflict and harmony, parental attention, and parental control; in other words, the more harmonious family functioning is, the higher the self-rated family environment score is, emphasizing that family cohesion and harmonious parent–child relationship can promote adolescents’ physical and mental development. Findings of related scholars’ research on the impact of parental participation on children’s academic performance, development skills, and social behavior are given as follows ( McCormick et al., 2013 ; Karmakar, 2017 ; Boonk et al., 2018 ): Parents’ educational level directly affects their children’s reading comprehension and math achievement; among them, the influence of mothers’ education level will be more lasting. Parents’ active participation in education has a significant effect on children’s academic achievement, educational achievement, and mental health, in particular parents’ support for the educational process, the cultivation of extracurricular interest, and the guidance of homework have a strong positive effect on the academic performance of adolescents ( Wang and Sheikh, 2014 ; Benner et al., 2016 ). The family investment theory explains the effect of the family socioeconomic status on academic achievement ( Duleep, 1998 ). Parents with high socioeconomic status will invest more in their children’s education (parents’ attention, support, and investment), and their children‘s academic achievement will be better ( Mudrak et al., 2020 ; Poon, 2020 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ). At the same time, perceived positive emotional expression in the family, daily communication, rule-making, and conflicting parental relationships have varying degrees of impact on adolescents’ behavioral tendencies (learning method and problem behavior) and academic achievement (social science, reading, language, and natural science scores) ( Ghazarian and Buehler, 2010 ; Veas et al., 2019 ). It can be seen that previous studies mainly focus on the influence of factors from one aspect: family on children’s academic achievement. In addition, while promoting the smooth development of family education, recognizing the characteristics of the cognitive level and social competence of students at the junior high school stage, students’ academic achievements in a broad sense are affected by factors such as family atmosphere, parent–child interaction, and family rules. As Bronfenbrenner emphasized family as a microsystem that directly affects individual development ( Bronfenbrenner, 1986 ), it serves as an educational ground for children’s symbolic values, sense of honor and disgrace, lifestyle, and various action strategies. It is further speculated that the score of the family environment generated by a family atmosphere, parent–child interaction, and family rules will have a direct effect on children’s academic achievement.

Peer interaction quality and academic achievement

Students in junior high school travel between home and school, with alternating contact with parents and peers, and it is a process of gradual stabilization and continuous cognitive reproduction. In a diverse school, students tend to view themselves by the preferences or standards of their peer group, which subconsciously affects the acquisition of social values and the completion of their studies. In Coleman’s book “ The Adolescent Society ,” he points out that “teens suffering from rejection from peers is almost equivalent to being rejected by their parents” ( Coleman, 1961 ). Combined with the peer group effect theory, peer group interaction conveys social norms, values, knowledge, and skills, and positive or negative peer relationships affect the learning attitude, self-expectation, and cognitive development of the participants ( Winkler, 1975 ). Academic interaction between students in the classroom and the average score are all related to learning performance (math scores); forming a learning group can increase the possibility of cooperating to complete homework and enhance learning interest ( Carman and Zhang, 2012 ). Comparing students in the classroom with their peers in the living environment and interaction with roommates in the informal environment have a stronger impact on academic performance ( Jain and Kapoor, 2015 ; Fang and Wan, 2020 ). In essence, the structure of the peer network (quality, scale, heterogeneity, and cohesion) and students’ learning behavior (positive and negative) have an effect on students’ academic achievement ( Berthelon et al., 2019 ; Qiu and Chai, 2022 ). For example, with diligent and dedicated classmates, the higher the quality of peer interaction (more positive peers and less negative peers in peer interaction), the better the results in subsequent learning ( Golsteyn et al., 2021 ). In addition, in a better school, this peer effect will be amplified accordingly, that is, in a better school environment, students can interact with better peers, and the quality of making friends will be higher. They supervise each other in learning, and their academic performance will be better ( Wang et al., 2021 ). Previous studies have not taken the quality of adolescents’ peer interaction as an important variable for research. Therefore, based on the quality of peer interaction in adolescents, that is, the “negative” or “positive” behavior of friends will affect their external performance and internal cognition, it is inferred that the more positive the quality of peer interaction, the more conducive to higher academic achievement.

Mediating effect of peer interaction quality

The social development of students in adolescence is crucial. As adolescents are gradually fleeing from getting along with their parents to making new friends, it is predicted that the effect of peers in the group on the social action or mentality structure of adolescents is increasing ( Brown et al., 1993 ); peers play an important role in academic achievement. Parents and peers are the main objects for adolescents to rely on and complain to, and both of them play an important role in the process of individual socialization. Sociologists Hartup and Stevens (1997) proposed two different types of interpersonal relationships, vertical and horizontal, for children. Vertical relationship refers to the relationship between children and adults, such as the parent–child relationship and teacher–student relationship, which are complementary and provide children with a safety guarantee and a learning environment. Horizontal relationship refers to the peer relationship with the level of self-development, which has the function of providing physical and mental development and interaction for children. Therefore, students lack the support of parents and peer friendship and are prone to depression, resulting in academic waste, and it is prone to depression, resulting in academic abandonment. Research on the family environment (family social capital and parenting style), peer interaction, and adolescents’ academic achievement, there are two types of views: First, family and peer influence on adolescents is “independent.” According to Harris’ group socialization development theory ( Harris, 1995 ): individuals acquire two independent behavioral systems inside and outside the family—the effect of family on children’s socialization is weakening, while the influence of peer groups in schools is increasing; for example, family education resources and parents’ SES have direct effects on adolescents’ math achievement and problem-solving ability ( Long and Pang, 2016 ; Wang et al., 2021 ), and peer friendship quality and friends’ gain and loss predict adolescents’ learning engagement and academic achievement ( Sebanc et al., 2016 ; Lessard and Juvonen, 2018 )—getting along with friends who study well and live actively influences their initial study and helps in getting better grades. Second, the influence of peers and family on adolescents is a “complementary” view ( Fukuoka and Hashimoto, 1997 ), that is, peer interaction transmits the effect of family environment on adolescents’ academic performance, compared with childhood, at the adolescent stage, parent education and parent-child interaction no longer meet their needs, but gradually extend to seeking support or help among peers, and peer interaction and family environment together influence adolescents’ growth. The family environment (parenting style, behavior supervision, and emotional intervention) plays a decisive role in the quality of peer interaction among adolescents; for example, parents supervise their children’s home time, places to go out, friend interactions, and homework completion, which would increase children’s exposure to peers with positive learning behaviors ( Deutsch et al., 2012 ; DeAnna, 2016 ), which indicates that parent–child communication and parental educational involvement influence children’s interpersonal interactions. At the same time, the peer network structure, friend quality, and personality orientation also affect students’ academic achievement ( Berthelon et al., 2019 ; Golsteyn et al., 2021 ). Based on the available research, a more superior family environment may have a positive effect on students’ academic achievement by increasing their peer interaction quality.

Moderating effect of educational expectation gap

Educational expectation is based on one’s cognitive ability, realistic conditions, and parents’ expectation of children or adolescents’ academic achievements in their future ( Wang and Benner, 2014 ). It belongs to a category of social cognition, including the sender and the expected. When the two are the same individual, it is called “self-education expectation,” and when the expectation is sender by parents and the expectation is expected by children, it is called “parental education expectation” ( Wang and Benner, 2014 ; Castro et al., 2015 ). The identity control theory points out ( Peter, 1991 ) that parental education expectation is seen as a reflective evaluation of important others, and it is an important type of social environment information input; self-education expectation is regarded as an individual’s identification standard of the current social role. When the two are inconsistent, individuals will have a sense of stress, which even leads to psychological distress and affects development, and is closely related to individual intrinsic motivation ( Moe, 2016 ). When parents’ educational expectation is moderate, it is conducive to the cultivation of children’s social value and the shaping of healthy personality, while when parents’ expectation is much higher than their children’s self-expectation, it will make the goal impossible to achieve, resulting in tense parent–child relationship and weariness of learning, which will harm academic achievement ( Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ; Lv et al., 2018 ). On the one hand, children’s reading and math scores are related to net household assets; the higher the SES of parents, the higher the educational expectation for their children, providing a quality educational environment to ensure that children have good supportive resources. Parents’ higher education expectation or lower self-education expectation moderates this effect ( Zhan, 2006 ; Zhang et al., 2011 ). The higher parental expectation and short-term educational expectation in junior high school have a lasting positive effect on children’s academic performance (school achievement, test scores, and academic completion) ( Yamamoto and Holloway, 2010 ). In fact, in the study of parents’ expectations and their children’s academic achievement (reading achievement and academic achievement), parents’ expectation of their children’s study is consistent with their expectation of self-education, which can better improve their social cognitive ability ( Phillipson and Phillipson, 2012 ; John and Bierman, 2017 ). It shows that the educational expectation gap between children and parents will moderate the impact of the family environment on academic achievement.

On the other hand, according to the analysis of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data, children grow up under the emotional education of their parents and have a better experience of happiness, making friends with active companions, less likely to fight, smoke, or take drugs ( Chan and Koo, 2011 ). In the study of 497 Dutch adolescents (13 years) from exposure to negative peers to crime, parents’ excessive restrictions on their children’s friends hinders their ability to develop autonomously and increases the risk of having bad peers ( Keijsers et al., 2012 ). Parents with higher SES have a higher expectation for their children, which accordingly enlarges the negative effects of problem peers. This process reflects that parents’ expectations, or parenting styles moderate the impact of family socioeconomic status on deviant peers ( Forgatch et al., 2016 ; Valdivia and Castello, 2020 ). Reviewing the research on the differences between children’s self-education expectation and perceived parents’ educational expectation, parents’ educational expectation is not always consistent with that of their offspring; both have different perceptions of future educational goals, which is universal ( Rutherford, 2015 ). When there is a large gap between parents’ educational expectation and self-educational expectation, the educational expectation gap affects the quality, scale, and structure of children’s peer relationship. Based on this, this study introduces the concept of the “educational expectation gap,” speculating that the intergenerational educational expectation gap plays a moderating role between the family environment, peer interaction quality, and academic achievement.

Present study and hypotheses

Previous studies reported the relationship between the family environment and academic achievement ( Benner et al., 2016 ; Boonk et al., 2018 ; Veas et al., 2019 ; Mudrak et al., 2020 ) and introduced the factors of parental education expectation, self-education expectation, and peer interaction ( Phillipson and Phillipson, 2012 ; Sebanc et al., 2016 ; Lessard and Juvonen, 2018 ; Qiu and Chai, 2022 ). Among them, most studies regard parental education expectation and self-education expectation as separate variables to examine the effect of the family environment on academic achievement ( Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ; Lv et al., 2018 ), and some scholars also studied the influence of the peer network structure, friendship quality, and personality orientation on adolescents’ academic achievement ( Berthelon et al., 2019 ; Golsteyn et al., 2021 ). Parents supervise their children’s home time, places to go out, friend interactions, and homework completion, which would increase children’s exposure to peers with positive learning behaviors, which may have a positive impact on children’s academic achievement ( Deutsch et al., 2012 ; DeAnna, 2016 ). However, few studies have emphasized the impact of the family environment and peer interaction quality on adolescents’ academic achievement and the role of the gap between parents’ and children’s educational expectations in this process, in particular the study of adolescents who are in the middle school stage and have high expectations for parental education and more contacts with peers. Therefore, according to the ecosystem theory ( Bronfenbrenner, 1986 ), the environment in which human beings live consists of four systems: microsystem, mesosystem, external system, and macrosystem, among which the microsystem refers to the way of activity, role patterns, and interpersonal relationship patterns of individuals in a particular environment; the way of behavior that promotes or inhibits individuals in that environment; and the interaction between individuals and that environment, which directly affects human cognitive ability, social development, and academic achievement; that is, the family environment and peer interactions are important microsystems of the individuals’ lives. This study constructs an analytical framework of significant others embedded in the family environment and then combines the peer group effect ( Winkler, 1975 ) and the identity control theory ( Peter, 1991 ), which emphasize the differences from significant others, self, and other identity criteria, to explore the role of the quality of peer interactions and educational expectation gap of adolescents in the microsystem in the impact of the family environment on academic achievement. Based on available research results, this study proposed the following hypotheses and a moderated mediation model (see Figure 1 ).

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Moderated mediation model.

Hypothesis 1 (H1) : Family environment will have a direct effect on adolescents’ academic achievement.

Hypothesis 2 (H2) : Peer interaction quality will have a direct effect on adolescents’ academic achievement.

Hypothesis 3 (H3) : Peer interaction quality will play a mediating role between family environment and adolescents’ academic achievement.

Hypothesis 4a (H4a) : Educational expectation gap will moderate the effect of family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement.

Hypothesis 4b (H4b) : Educational expectation gap will moderate the effect of family environment and adolescents’ peer interaction quality.

Materials and methods

Research data.

The data for this study are from the nationally representative “China Education Panel Study” (CEPS) implemented by the China Survey and Data Center of the Renmin University of China. The survey involves students, schools, and districts of multilevel characteristic variables, using a stratified multistage, probability, and scale proportional (PPS) sampling method. A total of 438 classes were randomly selected from 112 schools of 28 county-level units, and all the students in the selected class were investigated, in the baseline survey in 2015. A total of 10,279 junior middle school seventh-grade students were present after data merging and missing values filling, and 9,449 eighth-grade students successfully tracked in the 2016 follow-up survey are used as effective samples.

Variables and measurements

Academic achievement.

Combining the narrow and broad definitions of academic achievement ( Sacco, 1997 ), it refers to students’ academic performance and course acceptance at school, as well as knowledge, skills, and cognitive abilities acquired through certain teaching and training. The academic achievement of this study is measured by three indicators: students’ cognitive ability, test scores, and the acceptance ability of the main courses (Chinese, Math, and English). The project team designed a cognitive ability scale, which includes 22 items in three dimensions of language, graphics, and computing and logic, to measure students’ logical thinking and problem-solving ability. Each student’s score is used to measure cognitive ability. Referring to the academic achievement index ( Li et al., 2022 ), test scores are the total scores of students’ Chinese, math, and English midterm examinations. The ability to accept the main course is measured by asking students whether “is it hard to learn at present?” in the three courses of Chinese, math, and English, and each question corresponds to four options, with 1 representing “special effort” and 4 representing “no effort.” The scores of the three question items were summed to generate a continuous variable with a value range of 3–12. The higher the score, the easier the learning process experience. Based on the fact that academic achievement in this study includes three dimensions of cognition, objectivity, and subjectivity; the common factors of these three dimensions are extracted through exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The first factor is 1.63, and the second factor is 0.75 (1.63/0.75 = 2.17, 2.17 < 3), indicating that the constructed academic achievement is multidimensional. At the same time, considering that in the item response theory (IRT) model, the respondents’ response to the project (the probability of right answer) and their potential (psychological traits) have a certain connection and need to meet the measurement is a one-dimensional premise assumption ( Lord and Wingersky, 1984 ; Reise et al., 1993 ). Therefore, the method of dimension reduction of academic achievement by the EFA test is better. The results show that the cumulative variance contribution rate is 80.2%, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) value is 0.714, and the Bartlett sphericity test is significant ( p < 0.05), and the constructed academic achievement index has less information loss and strong representativeness.

Family environment

Based on the Family Environment Scale ( Oliver et al., 1988 ), Family Environment Scale-Chinese Version is revised ( Ni et al., 2021 ), including intimacy, emotional expression, contradiction, independence, success, culture, entertainment, morality, organization, and control; Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of each dimension is between 0.68 and 0.87. Combining with the Effective Pre-school and Primary Education project (EPPE), the scale includes parents’ attitudes and interaction with parents ( Eisenstadt, 2010 ). In this study, 29 items of the family atmosphere (seven items), parent–child interaction (eleven items), and family rules (eleven items) in CEPS were selected to evaluate adolescents’ family environment, using a three-point Likert scale; the higher the total score, the better the family environment, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of the questionnaire is 0.84.

Peer interaction quality

Using the Reference Friendship Quality Scale (FQS) ( Bukowski et al., 1994 ) and peer relationship measurement ( Martina et al., 2020 ), according to the items included in CEPS, positive peer interaction among students “friends with good grades, hard work, and want to go to college” (three items), and negative peer interaction “absence of class, violation of school discipline, fighting, smoking and drinking, Internet cafes or game hall, early love, dropout” negative peer interaction (seven items) were investigated. All were scored by a three-point Likert scale. Comparing the score of positive peer interaction with the total score of positive and negative peer interaction, the value is a continuous variable; the larger the value, the more positive the peer interaction and the higher the peer quality. We conduct confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on 10 items; the average variance extracted (AVE) of each second-order factor is between 0.570 and 0.594, which is greater than 0.50, and the composite reliability (CR) is between 0.798 and 0.910, which is greater than 0.70, indicating that the aggregation validity is high. The results of the model showed that Chisq = 1206.813, df = 34, Chisq/df = 35.494, RMSEA = 0.060, RMR = 0.006, GFI = 0.974, CFI = 0.976, TLI = 0.968, indicating that the results of CFA had good fitting indicators, and the resulting peer interaction quality had good stability and fitting degree.

Educational expectation gap

Based on the measurement of educational expectation ( Rutherford, 2015 ; Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ), since the general educational expectation of Chinese parents for their children is whether or not they can get into college, in this study, parental education expectation was measured by the parental question “what degree do you want your child to read?”; similarly, students’ self-education expectation was measured by the student question “what degree do you want yourself to read?.” Among the operationalized variables, parental education expectation was divided into two groups: parents want their children to go to college and not to have to go to college. Similarly, students’ self-education expectations were divided into two groups: students who wanted and did not want to get themselves into college. The difference between the former and the latter is used to generate the “educational expectation gap” variable; that is, parental education expectation below or equal to students’ self-expectation is labeled “low educational expectation,” and parental education expectation above students’ self-expectation is labeled “high educational expectation.” The educational expectation gap was converted into a dichotomous variable with a value of 0 or 1.

Analytical strategy

Considering the heterogeneity between different schools and relatively high homogeneity among students in the same school, we established a multilevel linear model to explore the relationship between adolescents’ academic achievement at the individual and school levels. We used Stata 15.1 software to transform the academic achievement (time 1 and time 2) into the range of 0∼100 by range normalization ( Hoffman, 2015 ; Maslowsky et al., 2015 ), that is, X’ = (X–X min )/(X max –X min ) × 100; eliminate the influence of variation dimension and variation range; and ensure that the estimated results can be compared under the same dimension: (1) Descriptive statistical results were presented, and 4,481 female students (47.4%) and 4,968 male students (52.6%) were included in the follow-up survey. The age ranged from 12 to 18 years old, M age = 13.55 years, SD = 0.70. There were 4,214 singleton students (44.6%) and 5,235 non-singleton students (55.4%). Table 1 . (2) The differences in the academic achievement of students with different family backgrounds and the correlation test of core variables were analyzed. (3) The influence of family environment and peer interaction quality in the base period survey (time 1) on the academic achievement tracked (time 2), and the role of educational expectation gap in it were also analyzed; if p < 0.05, regression is considered to be important. Academic achievement is measured by a lag phase of data, which can solve the endogenous problem and predict current academic achievement from the past environment or other factors. It has a clearer causal logic relationship ( Hoffman, 2015 ). The main study steps are as follows: First, a null model M0 with a random intercept but no explanatory variable is estimated to explore the total difference in academic achievement, which is decomposed into the difference between students and schools, and establish a school fixed effect model ( Bryk and Raudenbush, 1987 ). Second, model M1 tests the effect of the family environment. Third, model M2 tests explain differences in the peer interaction quality on academic achievement. Fourth, model M3 also adds the effects of the family environment and peer interaction quality prediction on academic achievement. Model M4 takes the sum of base period data and tracking data (academic achievement) as the dependent variable to test the robustness of the model. Finally, models M5, M6, and M7 are constructed to test whether peer interaction quality plays a mediating role between the family environment and academic achievement. The mediating effect test usually includes the Sobel (1982) test and stepwise method ( Baron and Kenny, 1986 ); these two methods require the assumption that the product term variables formed by the two methods have normal distribution, resulting in low test power on the test coefficient items in turn. In smaller samples, the bias-corrected bootstrap often reduces the error more than other methods ( Hayes and Scharkow, 2013 ). This study explores the effect of the family environment on academic achievement through mediating variables and uses KHB method to test the effect and size of mediation ( Kohler et al., 2011 ); the method can be any of Regress, Logit, Ologit, Probit, Oprobit, Cloglog, Slogit, Scobit, Rologit, Clogit, Mlogit, Xtlogit, or Xtprobit, and it can be extended to other models. At the same time, we also used the bootstrap repeated test results to further verify that peer interaction quality does play a mediating role. The models M5^ and M6^ are used to verify the moderating effect of the educational expectation gap; if the product of predictor (family environment) and moderator (educational expectation gap) has a significant effect on outcome variables (academic achievement and peer interaction quality) ( Baron and Kenny, 1986 ), it proves that the moderating variable plays a moderating role.

Variables of descriptive statistical results.

Brackets as the reference group. Academic achievement standardized to 0∼100.

Class differences, correlation, and fixed effect test of adolescents’ academic achievement

Analyzing the differences in adolescent academic achievement across family backgrounds (see Figure 2 ). Adolescents with high education-level parents, party membership, and household registration in urban areas have good academic achievements. In addition, in order to reveal the factors affecting adolescents’ academic achievement accurately, we tested the correlation of core variables. Academic achievement was positively correlated with the family environment ( r = 0.31, p < 0.05) and peer interaction quality ( r = 0.39, p < 0.05), and the family environment was positively correlated with peer interaction quality ( r = 0.28, p < 0.05). The educational expectation gap was negatively correlated with academic achievement ( r = −0.15, p < 0.05), family environment ( r = −0.07, p < 0.05), and peer interaction quality ( r = −0.13, p < 0.05). At the same time, we selected 20 schools as a small sample, aiming at determining the main effect of each school’s adolescents’ family environment on academic achievement, and measured the different intercepts and slopes in different schools, which confirmed the need to build a fixed effect model (see Figure 3 ).

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Differences in adolescents’ academic achievement in different households.

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Fixed effect test of different school academic achievements.

Multilevel regression estimation of adolescents’ academic achievement

As given in Table 2 , adolescent academic achievement was considered as the dependent variable and M0 as a null model, and the overall differences in academic achievement are broken down into differences between students and schools. The ICC between groups was 0.319, which shows that it is very suitable to use a multilevel regression model to control for heterogeneity factors between schools and to better estimate the net effect of family and peer-level factors on academic achievement. After M1 controls variables at the individual and school levels, the family environment has a positive impact on academic achievement (β = 0.26, p < 0.001); hence, H1 is verified. Similarly, in M2, peer interaction quality has a positive effect on academic achievement (β = 0.47, p < 0.001), that is, for every one-unit increase in the quality of peer interaction, adolescents’ academic achievement significantly increases by 47.0%; hence, H2 is verified. In M3, the family environment and peer interaction quality are added to confirm that the coefficients of the multilevel nested model have good stability, and it was found that the coefficient of family environment variables decreased from 26.0% to 19.0% after joining peer interaction quality, and it was still significant. It is necessary to further test the internal mechanism of the family environment and peer interaction quality affecting academic achievement. In M4, the mean value of the dependent variable (academic achievement) of the baseline survey and the follow-up survey is calculated. We built a full model, and the results are consistent with the influence coefficients in M3, showing that the whole research has good robustness.

Multilevel regression estimation results of adolescents’ academic achievement.

+ p < 0.1, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Family environment, peer interaction quality, and academic achievement: Moderated mediation model test

Table 3 , in M5, academic achievement as the dependent variable, the total effect of the family environment on academic achievement is 26.0%. In M6, with peer interaction quality as the dependent variable, the effect of family environment on peer interaction quality is 17.0%. In M7, with academic achievement as the dependent variable, the direct effect of adolescents’ family environment on academic achievement is 22.0%, which was 4.0% lower than the total effect (0.26–0.22 = 0.04), and the peer interaction quality has a significant impact on academic achievement (β = 0.42, p < 0.001). It shows that peer interaction quality transmits the influence of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement, especially the KHB test shows that peer interaction quality plays a partial mediating role in the process of the family environment affecting academic achievement, and the mediating ratio is 27.5%; hence, H3 is verified. Meanwhile, in M5^, the interaction between the family environment and educational expectation gap has a negative significant effect on academic achievement (β = −0.24, p < 0.001), and peer interaction quality moderates the effect of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement; hence, H4a is verified. In M6^, the interaction between the family environment and educational expectation gap had a negative effect on peer interaction quality (β = −0.07, p < 0.01), and peer interaction quality moderates the effect of family environment on peer interaction quality of adolescents; hence, H4b is verified. It shows that in the case of different educational expectations, the influence of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement and peer interaction quality is different; compared with the high-education expectation group, the influence of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement (β = −0.24, p < 0.001) and peer interaction quality (β = −0.07, p < 0.01) was weaker than that of the low-education expectation group.

Peer interaction quality and educational expectation gap: Moderated mediation effect test.

+ p < 0.1, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

According to the estimation results of the models in Tables 2 , ,3, 3 , we further draw the path diagram of the moderated mediation model. Figure 4 shows that the family environment and peer interaction quality have a significant positive effect on adolescents’ academic achievement of 0.26 and 0.47, respectively, which clearly verifies H1 and H2. Figure 5 shows the coefficients of the three paths of family environment → peer interaction quality, peer interaction quality → academic achievement, and family environment → academic achievement are 0.17, 0.42, and 0.22; it is measured that peer interaction quality transmits the effect of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement by 27.5% [(0.17 × 0.42)/0.26 = 0.275]. At the same time, bootstrap was used for the mediating test ( Hayes and Scharkow, 2013 ), and the mediating effect of peer interaction quality was tested by repeated sampling for 1000 times using the bootstrap method; the 95% confidence interval (CI) was [0.163, 0.196], which again verified that peer interaction quality plays a mediating role before family environment and academic achievement; hence, it supports H3. Figure 6 shows that the effect of interaction between the family environment and peer interaction quality on academic achievement is −0.24, and the effect of interaction between the family environment and educational expectation gap on peer interaction quality is −0.07, both of which indicate that the higher educational expectation gap will put adolescents’ academic achievement and peer interaction quality at a disadvantage, thus verifying H4a and H4b.

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Moderated mediation model (H1 + H2). *** p < 0.001.

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Moderated mediation model (H3). *** p < 0.001.

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Moderated mediation model (H4a + H4b). ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.

Students in the junior middle school stage are in puberty where their physical and mental development are not yet mature and are easily affected by important others and external environmental factors. Therefore, this study explores the relationship among the family environment, peer interaction quality, educational expectation gap, and adolescents’ academic achievement and further promotes the development of relevant theories. It also has important practical significance to improve adolescents’ academic achievement. On the one hand, this study is based on the ecosystem theory ( Bronfenbrenner, 1986 ), peer group effect theory ( Winkler, 1975 ), and identity control theory ( Peter, 1991 ). Placing adolescents’ academic achievement in a system influenced by the interaction of individual and environment, interactions between peer groups convey social norms and values, as well as parental education expectation is regarded as a reflective evaluation of important others, and there are differences between it and self-education expectation as the standard of individual’s current role orientation. Practical combined with theory, an analytical framework was constructed to study the academic achievement of adolescents, and it was verified that family environment and peer interaction quality play a positive role in academic achievement, which is basically consistent with previous research results ( Carman and Zhang, 2012 ; Boonk et al., 2018 ; Berthelon et al., 2019 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ), greatly expanded the Ecosystem Theory embedded in micro theory (Peer Group Effect, Identity Control) to study the academic achievement of adolescents.

On the other hand, this study also has important practical significance. It makes us understand the mediating role of peer interaction quality (from the influence of important others) between the family environment and academic achievement and enriches the research on the influence of the family environment and important others on academic achievement. It is necessary to pay attention to the influence of the family environment on children’s academic achievement in multiple ways, to create an active family atmosphere, frequent parent–child interaction, and strict family rules and to dynamically understand the quality of children’s peers. At the same time, the influence of peer interaction quality on academic achievement is a double-edged sword. When parents’ education expectation is higher than self-education expectation, it will not only negatively affect adolescents’ academic achievement but also lead to more negative peers; however, the gap between parents’ education expectation and self-education expectation is moderate, which plays a positive role in adolescents’ academic achievement ( Zhang et al., 2011 ; Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ). Therefore, we call on all sectors of society to pay attention to the moderate expectations of parents in the family for their children’s future roles or achievements and avoid pressure caused by too high or too low expectations. This plays an important role in children making positive peers and friends and achieving good academic achievements.

The mediating effect of peer interaction quality between family environment and academic achievement

The family environment is the external support resource to ensure adolescents’ academic success and the premise of various related factors in the teaching process. It is the initial field of children’s socialization and the carrier of shaping good academic achievements. Through the mediating effect test, the peer interaction quality of adolescents conveys the partial effect of the family environment on academic achievement. The empirical study dialogs with Harris’ group socialization theory and further verifies that peer interaction quality is the link between the family environment and children’s academic achievement ( Fukuoka and Hashimoto, 1997 ). The family environment directly affects the individual’s academic achievement, which is consistent with the results of studies indicating that family socioeconomic status, parents’ attention, support, and investment in children’s education affect their academic performance ( Poon, 2020 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ). At the same time, the family function also affects group selection and friend composition in individual peer interaction. Interaction with peers exerts a subtle influence on children’s academic achievement and personality shaping, which is consistent with previous studies ( Deutsch et al., 2012 ; DeAnna, 2016 ). In short, the present study introduced the mediating variable of peer interaction quality, which distinguished it from previous studies that commonly used learning anxiety, learning engagement, sense of autonomy, and parental involvement as mediating variables to build multiple or chained mediation models ( Li et al., 2022 ; Qiu and Chai, 2022 ), greatly enriches the research on academic achievement, putting children’s academic achievement in the symbolic social living space where the family field and peer network are nested, to form a dynamic field to assist children’s social development and renewal, through peer interaction quality (important others) indirectly affect individual academic achievement, this provides clues and support for further exploring the influence of peer groups on students’ academic achievement.

The moderating effect of educational expectation gap between family environment, academic achievement, and peer interaction quality

We propose a moderated mediation model based on relevant theories, by examining the role of the educational expectation gap within the family. Parents’ high educational expectations have a negative moderating effect on children’s academic achievement. That is, the model of ‘mother’s actual education wish >self-education wish’ negatively predicts academic performance, while the model of “mother’s actual education wish <self-education wish” positively predicts academic performance ( Wang and Benner, 2014 ). Differences in educational expectations similar to those between parents and children will hinder children’s reading, mathematics, language, and grade point average (GPA) ( Rutherford, 2015 ; Marcenaro and Lopez, 2017 ). The difference in educational expectations between parents and children is the product of the normal development process of an individual, and it is related to the pressure within the family (family function disintegration, poor family interaction, and poor family cohesion) that can make family members inconsistent ( Minuchin, 1985 ). It may also be the reason for the correlation between the intrinsic motivation of adolescents (including enthusiasm, pleasure, interest, enjoyment, and curiosity) and self-expectation ( Moe, 2016 ). This provides empirical support for the self-discrepancy theory, which points out that there are differences in real self, ideal self, and ought-to self, resulting in an unsatisfactory state, which may lead to depression and affect individual academic development ( Higgins, 1987 ). At the same time, the educational expectation gap moderates the effect of family environment on peer interaction quality, and it is consistent with previous studies which show that parents with low behavior control or high psychological supervision increase children’s chances of contacting poor peers. Peer transmission affects adolescents’ behavior development ( Forgatch et al., 2016 ; Valdivia and Castello, 2020 ). Based on this, for adolescents with a better family environment, a moderate educational expectation of parents and children can protect peer interaction quality and academic achievement, while excessive educational expectation gap between parents and children will increase the psychological burden of adolescents and have a negative impact on academic achievement. It expands the research of the educational expectation difference between parents and children in the field of individual academic achievement, taking into account the objective environmental factors of the family. We should also include the potential role of important others (parental expectations and peer interaction) in a diversified environment.

Limitations and future research directions

This study has some limitations and needs to be improved in future research: First, based on the theoretical basis, this work longitudinally studies the influence mechanism of the family environment on academic achievement, which provides empirical support for relevant theoretical viewpoints. However, the self-report in the tracking data may be biased, and experimental research will be used in the next step to obtain more reliable conclusions. Second, the data used are not designed to investigate students’ academic achievements. Future research will design a special questionnaire to collect data to ensure more accurate data information so as to monitor students’ academic development.

In conclusion, this study preliminarily verifies that peer interaction quality plays an intermediary role between the family environment and academic achievement. The educational expectation gap between parents and self within the family moderated the pathways of family environment → peer interaction quality (the first half path), and family environment → academic achievement (the direct path). Using the national-level survey data, rather than limited to a specific area of a small sample survey, a multi-country comparative study is planned for the next step. And further follow-up the factors of achievement motivation, emotional engagement and enthusiasm level of adolescents’ individual learning, the Structural Equation Model (SEM) or Chain Multi-mediary Model will be established to better capture adolescents’ academic achievement jointly from two dimensions: family microsystem and important others (peer interaction quality), enrich and extend the views of relevant theories, to provide practical enlightenment for a more scientific grasp of adolescents’ academic achievement.

This study uses longitudinal data from a survey of Chinese adolescents. So far, two waves of data have been collected. The research objects were 9,449 eighth-grade students who were successfully tracked, to explore the relationship between adolescents’ family environment (baseline survey) and academic achievement (follow-up survey), and pay special attention to the mediating effect of peer interaction quality between them, and the moderating effect of the gap between self- and parental educational expectations in this process. The results showed that first, the family environment and peer interaction quality can positively predict students’ academic achievement. Second, peer communication quality of adolescents plays a partial mediating role in the process of the family environment positively affecting academic achievement, with a mediating ratio of 27.5%. Third, the educational expectation gap not only moderates the path of the family environment directly influencing academic achievement but also moderates the first half path of the family environment influencing academic achievement through peer interaction quality; that is, the existence of a high educational expectation gap within the family will inhibit the positive effect of the family environment on adolescents’ academic achievement and peer interaction quality.

Data availability statement

Ethics statement.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Renmin University of China. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author contributions

LZ: conceptualization, methodology, validation, formal analysis, data curation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, visualization, funding acquisition, and guidance—original draft. WZ: writing advice. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Acknowledgments

We thank the National Survey and Data Center at the Renmin University of China for providing the data from CEPS-2016, and we thank the students and teachers who devoted time and support to this study.

This study was funded by the Guizhou Province Research Fund (No. KYJJ2017014) and Innovation Fund Project for Graduate Students (No. YAN2018005).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.911959/full#supplementary-material

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Essay about Family: Definition, Topics & Sample
What sets a family essay apart is its personal touch. It allows you to express your own thoughts and experiences. Moreover, it's versatile - you can analyze family dynamics, reminisce about family customs, or explore other facets of familial life. If you're feeling uncertain about how to write an essay about family, don't worry; you can ...
Parental Expectations: The Helpful and the Harmful
Our expectations encourage our children's development. When my daughter was 3 months old, I would already find myself standing her up on my belly whenever I was lying down. She was delighted ...
Expectations Of My Family And My Life
My family has several expectations of me. Such as school, my career, following rules for relationships, and how I should act. Body paragraph 1. The first expectation my family expect from me was in school and my career. For instance, my dad's expectation of school was that he had high hopes for me to go to a university, and I would become a ...
The Importance of Family Problems and Their Solutions
The effects of family problems can be far-reaching and long-lasting. affecting individuals physically, emotionally, socially, and financially. Emotional distress is one of the most common effects of family problems, with individuals experiencing feelings of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. Physical health problems can also arise, with ...
79 Family Problems Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
Economic Problems Causing Marriage and Family Problems. Elderly Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, and Proposed Solutions to These Two Family Problems. Determinants of Work-Related Family Problems Among Employed Parents. Matching Family Problems With Specific Family Preservation Services. Coping Profiles Associated With Psychiatric, Physical Health ...
109 Family Problems Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
Here are 109 family problems essay topic ideas and examples to inspire you: The impact of divorce on children. Sibling rivalry and jealousy. Parental favoritism and its effects on siblings. Balancing work and family life. Addiction and its impact on family dynamics. Mental health issues within the family.
Family Conflict Is Normal; It's the Repair That Matters
Researcher Ed Tronick, together with colleague Andrew Gianino, calculated how often infants and caregivers are attuned to each other. (Attunement is a back-and-forth rhythm of interaction where partners share positive emotions.) They found that it's surprisingly little. Even in healthy, securely attached relationships, caregivers and babies are in sync only 30% of the time. The other 70% ...
Dealing with Difficult Family Relationships
Begin to blame yourself for these poor relationships. Experience fear and anxiety surrounding family or holiday events. Hesitate to reach out to other family members. Suffer from lack of emotional or financial support during hard times. Develop trouble sleeping or focusing due to the stress of these interactions.
The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting
Dec. 25, 2018. Renée Sentilles and her son Isaac eating dinner at their home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She is raising him in a much more hands-on way than she was raised. Dustin Franz for The ...
Rising parental expectations linked to perfectionism in college students
Read the journal article. Washington — Rising parental expectations and criticism are linked to an increase in perfectionism among college students, which can have damaging mental health consequences, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers analyzed data from more than 20,000 American ...
Adolescence and the problem of parental expectations.
Unrealistic parental expectations about adolescence can cause emotional harm. Most parents, particularly of a first or only child, or a second child if the first has been particularly "easy," are ...
Family Conflict Resolution: 6 Worksheets & Scenarios (+ PDF)
Family Conflict Resolution: 6 Worksheets & Scenarios (+ PDF) 22 Nov 2021 by Jeremy Sutton, Ph.D. Scientifically reviewed by Christina R. Wilson, Ph.D. Families are surprisingly resilient, usually able to withstand and recover from severe conflict between family members and quickly return to familiar interactive patterns (Goldenberg, 2017).
How to Balance Family Expectations with your Personal Goals
Balancing family expectations with your personal goals can be challenging, intimidating, and stressful. It may require some honest and uncomfortable conversations. But it doesn't have to be a source of contention. Take the time to help your family understand your goals, and why they are important to you. Let them see that you are your own ...
Essay about family problems
The expectations of parents and children differ in many ways. The child expects increased amounts of independence, whereas the parent expects increased amounts of responsibility from the child. This is a suitable format in which a family may move forwards, but if both parties do not feel that the other is delivering, friction will occur and family problems may arise.
125 Family Relationships Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
Here are 125 family relationship essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your writing: The role of siblings in shaping our identity. How parents influence our career choices. The impact of divorce on children's relationships with their parents. The importance of extended family in providing support and guidance.
My Family Essay
Writing essay about family celebrates the beauty, complexity, and transformative power of family bonds. By reflecting on personal experiences, examining family dynamics, and acknowledging diversity, you can create an essay that pays homage to the remarkable tapestry of family life. Embark on a journey of self-discovery and understanding as you explore the deep connections within your own family.
Family, Culture, and Communication
Family is the fundamental structure of every society because, among other functions, this social institution provides individuals, from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging, economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization (Canary & Canary, 2013 ). As a consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a system in a manner that would benefit all ...
Parental Expectations and Children's Academic Performance in ...
The role of parental expectations in affecting children's academic progress has received substantial attention from psychologists and sociologists over the past half century. In general, parental expectations have been found to play a critical role in children's academic success. Students whose parents hold high expectations receive higher grades, achieve higher scores on standardized tests ...
10.2 Sociological Perspectives on the Family
The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. Family problems stem from economic inequality and from patriarchal ideology. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members. Symbolic interactionism.
Family Expectations Essay
Family Expectations Essay. 708 Words2 Pages. For my research topic I chose to write on the effects of expectation. The expectations of one's family and one's self can have a major influence on his/ her life. When some tries to live up to a high expectation it can cause the individual a great deal of stress. Therefore, the question the ...
Examples of Household Rules for the Entire Family
Treat People and Property With Respect. These rules may include: Ask permission to borrow other people's belongings. Do not hurt anyone's body (no hitting, pushing, or kicking). Do not hurt anyone's feelings (no yelling, put-downs, or name-calling). Implement an immediate consequence if this rule gets broken.
Impacts of family environment on adolescents' academic achievement: The
The family environment is the sum of physical and psychological conditions, which carries the development of individual personality and behavior, among which family relations and parent-child interaction are its important components, affecting children's academic achievement, character quality, and the expression of psychological modeling functions ( Wilder, 2014; Krauss et al., 2020 ...
Essay On Parents Expectations On Academic Performance
The roots of parents' expectations on students are that they are expected to do well in school and graduate. 2. The parents' expectations affect the students by making them think that they cannot afford to make a mistake. 3. The common parents' expectations on students are that they should do good in school, earn achievements, and graduate.