Parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of parental involvement and their relationships with depression among Chinese middle school students during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Although psychological stress that adolescents may encounter during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of increasing interest to scholars, few studies have examined the profound impact that parents give to adolescents when staying indoors. This study surveyed 1,550 students and their parents from eight middle schools in eastern China. We employed multiple linear regressions with school fixed effects to examine the different perceptions of parental involvement between parents and children, and the relationships between these different types of parental involvement and depression in middle school students. Results indicated that discrepancies existed in their perceptions of behavioral aspects of parental involvement, including parental academic involvement, parent-teacher communication, and parent–child communication. Most saliently, higher levels of parental academic involvement (B = 0.051, p < 0.05) and lower levels of parent–child communication (B = -0.084, p < 0.05) perceived by students were associated with higher levels of depression. These findings contribute to the understanding of the association between parental involvement and students’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parents’ perception or children’s perception? Parental involvement and student engagement in Chinese middle schools

“…Consistent with prior research (Paulson, 1994;Paulson and Sputa, 1996;DePlanty et al, 2007;Thomas et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021), this study revealed that Chinese parents and their children had different perceptions of parental involvement. Some past studies found that parents reported higher levels of parental involvement behaviors than their children (Paulson, 1994;Paulson and Sputa, 1996;DePlanty et al, 2007), while the results showed that parents could either report a higher or a lower level of parental involvement than their children.…”

“…Similarly, although Liu et al (2021) did not examine parental daily involvement, they found that both parents and children reported a higher level of parent-child communication than parental academic involvement. This might result from the relatively less time and energy required by the parental daily involvement than by the other types of parental involvement, especially parental academic involvement.…”

“…Considering the cultural differences in raising children (Lui and Rollock, 2013;Fu and Markus, 2014), parents' and their children's perceptions of parental involvement in Chinese families might show different patterns. Compared with the few relevant studies on Chinese students conducted at the outset of COVID-19 when the stay-at-home order was in place (Liu et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2021), the current study examined parents' and their children's perceptions of parental involvement after schools reopened and may yield different results.…”

Parental Home Monitoring and Support and Students’ Online Learning and Socioemotional Well-Being During COVID-19 School Suspension in Hong Kong

“…Second, we need to understand how parental involvement contributes to students’ learning and socioemotional well-being during the school suspension ( Demir and Demir, 2021 ; Lawrence and Fakuade, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Yang et al, 2022 ). The knowledge gleaned from research in this area can inform parental involvement practices in the New Normal of education—situations that call for agile switching across blended, fully online (asynchronous or bichronous), or hybrid (combining face-to-face and online synchronous at the same time) learning modes ( Martin et al, 2020 ; Morse et al, 2022 ), which may be compelled by future episodes of mandatory school suspension or in support of pedagogical innovation initiatives.…”

“… Wang et al (2021) found that adolescents who received more parental social support had higher levels of positive affect and lower levels of negative affect in the United States. Liu et al (2021) reported that higher levels of parental academic involvement and lower levels of parent–child communication was associated with higher levels of middle school student depression during the pandemic in China. Yang et al’s (2022) study showed that middle school students in China had higher levels of affective engagement in their learning if they had involved parents and supportive teachers.…”