Factors influencing parental investment : does parental financial allocation vary as a function of perceived child sexual orientation?
Abstract
An evolutionary perspective on parental investment suggests that natural selection might have favored mechanisms by which parents can evaluate the likelihood of a given offspring’s chances of successful reproduction. Adopting such a perspective, an online survey-based monetary allocation task was employed to test the hypothesis that parental investment was positively related to likelihood of offspring heterosexuality, such that vignettes describing heterosexual offspring would receive more money than vignettes describing homosexual offspring. Results did not support this hypothesis, as investment in offspring was unrelated to perceived offspring sexual orientation. However, exploratory analyses revealed that increasingly negative attitudes towards lesbians and gays predicted decreased investment in offspring. Such findings could serve to embolden civil rights activists in their struggle for increased LGBT social rights. Future research in this area would benefit from correlational research examining real familial relationships and investment patterns, rather than experimentally simulated relationships, to increase the external validity of findings and to reduce social desirability bias.Collections
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A Parent Involvement Program Focusing on Fine Motor and Language Development and its Effect on Parent Participation at HomeKindergarten curriculum today has become more academically oriented, particularly emphasizing the development of literacy. However, when children come to school lacking fine motor, language development skills, and exposure to literature, they are at a disadvantage. Fine motor skills are necessary for writing and drawing, while exposure to language and literature is essential for reading skills and social interaction. Parent involvement at home can help with children’s academic performance by meeting these pre-existing needs. The purpose of this study is to develop emerging literacy in kindergarten children through fine motor, language development and children’s literature activities at home. The authors designed a variety of home activities meant to complement work done at school. Parents filled out feedback questionnaires before the program began and after its completion. The program was evaluated based on student answers to questions and brief conferences, observations, oral language arts assessment, and fine motor skill screening of students. The authors found a 95% increase in fine motor skills and an increase in the language arts skills of students with attendant increases of verbal communication and reading activity at home. The findings suggest parent involvement at home increase a child’s emerging literacy skills.
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Parental Involvement: Barriers Hispanic Parents FaceAbstract Parental involvement in education is considered to be one of the key contributing factors to students’ academic success whose benefits have been well established. In spite of this, lack of parental involvement continues to be one of the leading concerns schools in the United States face, especially among Hispanic parents whose children have long been characterized by low levels of high school completion and highest dropout rates of any other ethnicity. Findings indicate that Hispanic parents face unique barriers, such as language barriers, low levels of education, and economic hardships that hinder their involvement in their children’s education and that traditional approaches aimed at increasing parental involvement, which focus on school-based involvement, have proved largely ineffective with Hispanic parents as they fail to consider the factors that dissuade parents from becoming involved. These insights can inform schools and educators’ efforts of increasing parental involvement by identifying and creating awareness about the factors that influence and preclude parental involvement among Hispanic parents.
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Parental Involvement and the Influence of Parents’ Prior Literacy ExperiencesThis study examines parents’ prior literacy experiences and how those experiences influence their involvement with literacy activities at home. The data for this study were collected through interviewing parents who had children in my kindergarten classroom. After analyzing the data, multiple themes were identified, which includes positive literacy experiences may be provided by adults other than parents, parental involvement takes on many forms, and the importance of teachers and parents to establish relationships to support student literacy learning. The conclusion of this study is that parents’ prior literacy experiences have a direct influence on their involvement with their children. This is because parents carry their prior experiences with them as adults. Parents will try to replicate their prior experiences with their children. The literacy activities that parents engaged in as a child are what they will try to engage in with their own children at home
