Barriers and Benefits of Primary Caregivers' Involvement in Children’s Education during COVID-19 School Closures

Dr Zhang, Xiao   (Principal Investigator (PI))

24

2021-06-25

120000

Barriers and Benefits of Primary Caregivers' Involvement in Children’s Education during COVID-19 School Closures

covid-19, emotional distress, family involvement, learning behavior

PsychologyOthers - Education

Humanities & Social Sciences (H)

202011159030

Seed Fund for PI Research – Basic Research

2020

Completed

According to UNESCO (2020), over 190 countries have implemented nationwide school closures due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), affecting at least 90% (1.57 billion) of students worldwide. Consequently, many children around the world have been spending unprecedented amounts of time at home (Wang et al., 2020), and many caregivers are facing the challenge of educating their children (Burgess & Sievertsen, 2020). Little is known about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected caregivers’ involvement in their children’s education and whether such involvement has been beneficial to children’s learning and well-being. The proposed study will addressed three research questions: (1) Do the pandemic lead primary caregivers to increase or decrease their involvement in their children’s education at home? (2) Which familial characteristics were potential barriers to caregivers’ home-based involvement amid the pandemic? (3) Did such involvement enhance the learning behavior and emotional health of preschool children? There has been a growing awareness that caregivers’ involvement may be more critical to facilitating children’s learning and well-being during the pandemic than it was prior to it (Learning Heroes, 2020; Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). Such an awareness has raised questions about how caregivers have been engaged in their children’s education during the pandemic. Although Fantuzzo’s multidimensional model of family involvement (Fantuzzo et al., 2000) has been the basis for much of the research on caregiver involvement, it should not be treated as a straightforward account of the ways caregivers have been involved with their children during the pandemic. The containment measures implemented by many countries against COVID-19, such as social distancing and school closures, have led to the cancellation or suspension of many school-related activities, such as school trips and parents’ volunteer activities (Rundle et al., 2020; Viner et al., 2020). School closures have also largely reduced or even eliminated caregivers’ opportunities to meet with school staff and have limited their communication with teachers (Adams & Todd, 2020; Clausen et al., 2020). In the proposed study, therefore, we focus on caregivers’ home-based involvement. One purpose of the proposed study is to examine how the pandemic affected caregivers’ home-based involvement in their children’s education. There are at least two competing hypotheses regarding this question. One is that caregivers may have spent more time educating their children during the pandemic than they did prior to it, possibly because home quarantine and work-from-home arrangements gave them more time at home with their children (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020; Learning Heroes, 2020). An alternate hypothesis is that the pandemic may have led caregivers to decrease their involvement in children’s education, possibly because it disrupted their pre-crisis ways of life (Del Boca et al., 2020; Griffith, 2020), and may have led to health and economic emergencies within some families (Brown et al., 2020; Fontanesi et al., 2020), which may have placed increased competing demands on caregivers’ time and energy and constrained the amount of time spent on children’s education (Prime et al., 2020). Although little is known about whether the COVID-19 pandemic specifically has hindered or strengthened caregivers’ involvement, researchers have identified a wide range of barriers to caregiver involvement in normal non-crisis situations. In relation to this, the second purpose of the proposed study is to examine potential familial barriers to caregivers’ home-based involvement during the pandemic. In the literature, single parenthood (Fantuzzo et al., 2000), a lower family socioeconomic status (Manz et al., 2004), and larger family sizes (Manz et al., 2004) have been found to hinder caregivers’ home-based involvement. We argue here that family members’ physical health, economic instability, and household chaos resulting from the pandemic may have counted among the potential family barriers to caregivers’ involvement. First, caregivers have needed to look after their own and other family members’ physical well-being. The demands on caregivers’ time and energy to care for sick family members, such as those infected with the coronavirus, may have resulted in caregivers’ having little available time for educating their children (Eccles & Harold, 1993). Second, many people have lost their jobs or experienced diminished income due to the lockdowns. Income instability may have impeded positive parenting practices and limited the amount of attention, time, and supervision that caregivers could give to their children (Monahan, 2020). Third, caregivers working from home may have struggled to balance their multiple responsibilities (e.g., managing their jobs, chores, and childcare; Garbe et al., 2020) and thus may have experienced high levels of household chaos such as noise or disorder in the home. Such chaos and confusion in the household may have led to unfinished work, and, in turn, increased employment demands on caregivers’ time and energy, thereby leaving them with little available time to educate their children (Johnson et al., 2008). The third purpose of this study is to examine whether caregivers’ home-based involvement during the pandemic is beneficial to their preschool-aged children’s learning behavior and emotional health. Caregivers’ home-based involvement has been considered to be critically important, because it often facilitates children’s learning through practice, instruction, scaffolding, and the provision of cognitively stimulating environments (Barger et al., 2019). In a meta-analysis by Barger et al. (2019), learning behavior such as academic motivation had a stronger correlation with caregivers’ home-based involvement than did other aspects of child adjustment (e.g., academic achievement). Recently, evidence has emerged linking caregivers’ involvement to preschool children’s learning behavior. Hayes et al. (2018) showed that caregiver involvement in shared reading and home activities at age 2 years predicted children’s positive learning behavior at age 6 years. Caregiver involvement also provides an important context for children’s socioemotional development (Barger et al., 2019). The extant research has documented the benefits of caregiver involvement for the emotional adjustment of primary and middle school children (Nokali et al., 2010; Wang & Sheikh-Khalil, 2014). Less attention has been devoted to the benefits of caregiver involvement for preschool children’s emotional adjustment.