BECE. Newsletter 

BECE, Vol.10, No.1, 2022 1350 

 

 

 

 

Parental Involvement, Confidence in the Future, and 

Adolescent Development: A Comparative Analysis of 

Native and Migrant Adolescents 

By Wu, W., & Li, J. L. 
Correspondence to: Li, J. L., Shanghai Normal University, China. E-mail: 

eduhappycharlie@shnu.edu.cn  

HE study, published in Education & Economy, is based on Coleman’s 

social capital theory, and takes the 7th graders at the baseline and 8th 

graders in the second-phase survey in the follow-up educational survey in 

China as analysis sample. It uses seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) 

analysis to study the impact of parental involvement on native and migrant 

adolescents’ cognitive ability, psychology and behavior. The sub sample re-

gression analysis and Z-test are used to explore the impact of family partici-

pation in education on the development of native and migrant adolescents. 

Finally, through the chain mediating effect analysis, this study examines the 

potential mediating effect of confidence in the future on parental involve-

ment and adolescent development. The results are summarized as follows. 

 SUR analysis results indicate that parental involvement is closely 

related to adolescents’ cognitive, psychological, and behavioral 

development. Parent-child communication positively predicts ad-

olescents’ cognitive ability and reduces psychological and behav-

ioral problems. Parental supervision can also reduce children’s 

psychological and behavior problems. Home-school contact nega-

tively predicts adolescents’ cognitive ability and positively pre-

dicts their psychological and behavioral problems, which might 

be a result of adolescents’ reactive behavior and resistance to ex-

cessive parental intervention. 

 The results of sample regression analysis and Z-test show that pa-

rental involvement has a remarkable impact on the development 

of both native and migrant adolescents, and there is no significant 

difference in the impact effect. There are some differences in the 

effect of parental involvement only among migrant adolescents. 

Parent-child communication can reduce the psychological and 

behavioral problems of both local and migrant adolescents, but it 

can only improve the cognitive ability of local adolescents; 

T 

mailto:eduhappycharlie@shnu.edu.cn


 

BECE, Vol.10, No.1, 2022 1351 

Home-school contact negatively predicts the cognitive ability of 

native adolescents and has no significant impact on that of mi-

grant adolescents. 

 Chain mediated effect analysis results indicate that parental in-

volvement significantly affects adolescents’ and parents’ confi-

dence in the future. Parents can participate in adolescents’ educa-

tion through parent-child communication, parental supervision, 

and home-school contact to exert positive impact on native and 

migrant adolescents’ confidence in the future.  

Given the above analyses, the study suggests that more attention 

should be paid to the role of parental participation and the guiding role of 

schools in parental participation given full play; Foreign experience in 

providing educational compensation programs to vulnerable families, espe-

cially migrant families can be used as reference; Advancing supporting re-

forms and lowering the threshold of urban compulsory education will also 

help change the pessimistic attitude of disadvantaged parents towards their 

children’s future. 

 

Source: Education And Economy, 2021(5):66-76.