International Declines in Parental Support of Students

International Declines in Parental Support of Students (OECD PISA) [Preliminary]

This post is related to (but not a part of) the Youth Suicide Rise project.

Summary:

In all but one of the 35 surveyed OECD countries, the portion of 15-year-old students agreeing their parents support their educational efforts has declined between 2015 and 2018, while the portion disagreeing has increased by at least 50% in 29 of the 35 countries (the OECD average close doubling from 6% to 11%). The trends were nearly as strong and universal for parental support during difficulties at school and for parental encouragement. No country had substantial declines for disagreeing on any of the three questions and only Korea had substantial increases for strongly agreeing.

PISA Parental Support Questions

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) introduced a group of three questions in 2015 to assess student perceptions of parental support:

Thinking about <this academic year>: to what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?

My parents support my educational efforts and achievements.

My parents support me when I am facing difficulties at school.

My parents encourage me to be confident.

with the possible answers being: Strongly disagree / Disagree / Agree / Strongly agree.

Note: results presented as triples n₁ n₂ n₃ are for these questions in the order listed.

The survey was given to 15-year-old students in both 2015 and 2018 in nearly all OECD countries (35 out of the 38 full members).

OECD Trends

The vast majority of students agreed their parents were supportive (2015 OECD averages 94% 91% 90%) and most agreed strongly this was so (2015 OECD averages 57% 51% 52%).

By 2018, the OECD averages declined to 89% 86% 86% for any agreement and to 50% 45% 47% for strong agreement. The absolute changes were thus about 5 percentage points for agreements and 5 to 7 percentage points for strong agreements.

The median changes among the 35 OECD countries were ‑4 ‑5 ‑3 percentage points for any agreement and ‑7 ‑7 ‑5 for strong agreement. The relative declines were thus greater for strong agreement (the median changes being ‑5% ‑5% ‑4% for any agreement and ‑11% ‑14% ‑11% for strong agreement).

Relative changes were logically much larger for the small portions of students who did not perceive parental support: the median increases being +83% for academic effort, +44% for school difficulties, and +36% for encouragement.

Country Trends

For disagreement, the only country without any increases was Mexico and no country had a decrease of more than one percentage point on any of the three questions.

For strong agreement, only Korea was without any declines and only Korea had any increase over 3 percentage points (+7 +8 +7).

U.S. Trends

In the U.S. the portions of students who did not perceive parental support doubled or nearly doubled for each question (4% -> 7%, 9% -> 17%, 6% -> 12%). The U.S. started at or above typical OECD support levels in 2015 (+2, 0, +2 percentage points above OECD medians) but ended up at or below OECD levels by 2018 (-4, -3, 0).

Discussion

The overall trend is remarkably universal: out of the 35x3x2 = 210 individual trends (country x question x disagreement or strong agreement criteria) only 9 were in the direction of increased support.

This is remarkable given that 35 countries were involved. Although these are mostly European countries, the social and educational variations among these nations are still considerable.

Context

Although the presumed context for each of the three questions is clearly school, only the first question is related purely to education; the second may involve disciplinary or peer problems and the third is rather general ("encourage me to be confident") and may include, say, sport activities connected to school.

As we will see later, there are similar trends regarding declines in the sense of belonging by students, both in relation to peers and school itself, and also widespread declines in student beliefs that education is useful. These and possibly other educational trends need to be examined jointly in the future.

Explanations

One possible explanation is that it is students, not parents, who changed: expectations of parental support by teens have increased and therefore its subjective evaluation by teens has become more stringent.

It is also possible that students presume parents to be supportive until proven otherwise, and if there were mounting school challenges in 2018, there were more opportunities for parents to fail the expectations of support. In this model, the declines in perceived support would not be due to any changes in the psychology of the students or their parents, but entirely due to increasing difficulties encountered by students in schools -- perhaps schools are becoming more academically demanding, or more disciplinary, or perhaps because classroom climate is deteriorating due to bullying or competition, and so on. It does not seem, however, that this explanation fits very well the declines in the "encourage me to be confident" item.

Finally, the declines could be due to parents truly becoming less supportive. If that is so, then the question is to what degree this is a result of changing cohorts -- the newer parents being different from the older parents -- and to what degree this is due to social changes -- many individual parents becoming less supportive of their kids.

Implications

Regardless of the causes, the growing portion of students who do not perceive their parents to be fully supportive can certainly be a problem in schools -- most teachers will no doubt agree that parents have a strong influence on the education of their children. Furthermore, the 17% of U.S. students who ceased to believe they can rely on parents when they encounter difficulties in school can hardly be dismissed as too small a fraction to matter much.

Furthermore, understanding the mechanisms behind these trends may help our efforts to understand -- and prevent -- mental health declines within youth, such as rising anxiety and depression rates or the doubling of adolescent suicide between 2007 and 2018.

Limitations: The PISA data explorer returns only whole numbers for percentages, so besides sampling issues this is another reason to view the loneliness trends calculated by me as approximate and preliminary.

Technical note: We did not use the strong disagreement vs disagreement boundary for a trend criteria because the portions of students disagreeing strongly are too small for the results to be highly reliable (due to sampling, rounding, and natural fluctuations).