Parental Academic Involvement Across Adolescence Contextualized by Gender and Parenting Practices

Parental academic involvement is critical in promoting children's long-term academic success and may be especially impactful during middle school. However, longitudinal research is lacking for Mexican-origin youth and has focused mostly on mothers. Mexican-origin mothers and fathers reported their academic involvement during seventh grade, and we examined the moderating role of adolescents' reports of parental acceptance and harsh parenting in the association between parental academic involvement and 12th grade academic outcomes (N = 720 families). We also examined whether these associations were similar for girls and boys. Mothers' academic involvement predicted boys' grade point average (GPA) and preparation for postsecondary education for girls and boys. Mothers' and fathers' academic involvement were not associated with girls' GPA. Significant interactions between fathers' academic involvement and parenting were observed. Fathers' academic involvement positively predicted girls' preparation for postsecondary education, but only if their daughters perceived them to have lower levels of harshness parenting. Fathers' involvement was negatively linked with daughters' preparation for postsecondary education if they perceived higher levels of harshness from fathers. Conversely, fathers' academic involvement was positively linked with boys' preparation for postsecondary education if their sons perceived their fathers to have higher or average levels of harshness harshness. Patterns between father- son dyads replicated for a marginal interaction predicting boys' GPA. Parental academic involvement may be crucial for Latino adolescents, and parents may uniquely combine their parenting strategies to yield optimal academic outcomes for their girls and boys.