Parent Practices and Home-School Partnerships: A Differential Effect for Children with Same-Sex Coupled Parents?

Parents can profoundly influence the long-term academic success of their children. Parental involvement with their children's schools has consistently been associated with much better long-term academic and social outcomes. Unfortunately, same-sex parents often feel disconnected and unwelcome in schools. In order to extend the research supporting parent practices and strong family-school collaboration, the present study used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) data set to examine the following: (1) How same-sex families compare to heterosexual families with respect to the parental practices of helping and communicating; (2) How home-school partnerships compare across same-sex and heterosexual families; and (3) Whether a strong home-school partnership is more important for the academic achievement and social adjustment of children with same-sex parents given the societal context in which these children are embedded. Results indicated that same-sex and heterosexual parents did not differ with respect to their parent practices or home-school partnerships. Further, home-school partnerships were not differentially important for children with same-sex parents.

空

本研究使用美国“幼儿纵向研究-幼儿园队列”（ECLS-K）数据集，分析了1998-1999学年22,000名来自多种族和不同社会经济背景的幼儿园儿童的全国代表性样本。研究选取了其中35个同性伴侣家庭和35个异性伴侣家庭，并通过独立样本t检验和回归分析，比较了两类家庭在亲职实践（包括帮助和沟通维度）和家校合作（包括家长主导和学校主导的合作）方面的表现。研究同时探讨了家庭类型对家校合作与儿童学业及社会适应结果之间关系的调节作用，采用IRT分数衡量学业成绩，并通过问卷评估儿童的社会技能。数据分析过程中应用主成分分析（PCA）简化测量指标，并通过统计加权确保结果的广泛适用性，同时控制关键假设以保证分析的有效性和可靠性。

本研究发现，同性父母和异性父母在育儿实践（如帮助和沟通）上没有显著差异。两组父母表现出了相似的行为，支持了先前的研究结论，即家庭动态比父母的性取向更为重要。此外，研究还发现，同性父母和异性父母在家校合作方面也没有显著差异。这一发现与先前文献中指出同性父母在学校环境中可能面临负面经历的观点相反。研究还表明，强有力的家校合作对同性父母的孩子并没有产生不同的影响。这些结果表明，无论父母的性取向如何，家长与学校的参与程度相似，家庭动态而非性取向在孩子的成果中起着更为重要的作用。然而，由于样本量小和依赖父母报告数据等限制，未来的研究仍需深入探讨影响家校关系的因素，尤其是学校气候和披露实践等。