Parent’s Involvement in Homework: The Effects of Parental Reactions to Pupils’ Emotions on Academic Performance

Abstract

In recent years, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China has implemented a "double reduction" policy to reduce the burdens of pupils from homework. However, the pupils still have to face great pressure from homework unavoidably due to the increasingly fierce competition and parents’ anxiety about children’s education. For parents, accompanying their children’s homework is not only an obligation but also a challenge, which has attracted more and more social attention. Generally, it is anticipated that there are several advantages if the parents can accompany their children when they are doing their homework. First, it can help form a good family learning atmosphere and imperceptibly affect children's learning attitude. Second, parents can provide targeted guidance according to the needs of children, correct their homework mistakes in time, and improve the completion degree and quality of homework, thus possibly improving the academic performance of the pupils. However, practical problems also exist when parents accompany their children to do their homework, including poor accompanying quality, negligence of children's negative emotions, over-strong purpose, and lack of in-depth emotional communication. In particular, parents' emotional responses can indirectly affect children's academic performance by influencing their emotional regulation ability. In this work, we suggest that the parents respond to the children's negative emotions in a supportive manner during the process of homework. That is, the parents can try to reduce the utilitarian nature of accompanying homework and strengthen the emotional communication. In such a way, they can regard the accompanying homework as a participation in the growth of a period of life to effectively alleviate the anxiety brought by the accompanying.