Family & Academic Success

 I don't know about you, but I've known a few families throughout my life where it seemed like all their children were at the top of their high school classes, then headed to fantastic colleges, and now have rigorous degrees from top-notch graduate schools. I often wonder, "What are they doing at home? Is their secret formula something I could bottle up and distribute to other families?" Well, I just re-read an article in a school counseling journal about family practices that seem to contribute to children's academic success. It is not a magic potion, but it is a specific list of family actions that are linked to children's success in school. I will probably dig into this more deeply next year, for those of you who will be with my email list and blog then. However, I thought I would go ahead and post a summary now, so that those of you who might leave the list next year will at least get an overview. There are four groups of actions, and each one is broken down further into more detailed items. Hope you find it as interesting as I did!

Group 1: Family Beliefs and Expectations
1. Sense of Purpose: focus on setting goals, taking concrete steps toward them, building on successes, and learning from failures. Commitment to family life and parenting role.
2. Positive Outlook: Hopeful, optimistic, confident about overcoming odds, encouraging, focus on strengths and potential, master the possible and accept what cannot be changed.
3. Sense of Efficacy: active initiative and perseverance, a "can do" spirit, confident in one's ability, view adversity as an opportunity to learn and a normal part of life.

Group 2: Family Emotional Connectedness
1. Emotional Warmth & Belonging: provide emotional warmth and caring; demonstrate mutual support, collaboration, and commitment; respect individual needs, differences, and boundaries of family members; have enjoyable, humor-filled interactions.
2. Open Emotional Sharing: Share range of feelings rather than repress or avoid expressing feelings; demonstrate empathy for each other; take responsibility for own feelings and behavior rather than blaming others.
3. Clear Communication: Consistency between words and actions, clarify meanings and intentions if imformation is ambiguous.
4. Collaborative Problem-Solving: Share decision-making and conflict resolution; focus on mutuality, fairness, and reciprocity.

Group 3: Family Organizational Patterns
1. Strong Leadership & Clear Expectations: Clear leadership hierarchy of roles and responsibilities; strong alliance between children's different caregivers; set clear and realistic guidelines and expectations for children's behavior.
2. Firm But Friendly Management Style: Actively monitor children's activities and performance at home and school; maintain dependable family routines and responsibilities; adapt and reorganize to fit changing needs and circumstances of children.
3. Developed Social Network: Mobilize extended kin and social support; find and develop community resources; initiate home-school contact.

Group 4: Family Learning Opportunities
1. Development of Family Routines that Support Achievement: Monitor homework and children's school performance; engage in enriching learning activities; engage in frequent parent-child conversations about current school performance and long-term goals.
2. Explicit Skill Instruction: Seek knowledge of children's current school performance and strengths and weaknesses in learning; orient children to both academic and social skills learning opportunities; give regular, explicit feedback to children about their performance in learning activities; demonstrate positive feelings about learning activities.

*All of the above information is from the article "From Family Deficit to Family Strength: Viewing Families' Contributions to Children's Learning from a Family Resilience Perspective" by Amatea, Smith-Adcock, and Villares. Published in the journal Professional School Counseling, February 2006.