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Parent involvement is a major component of several school reform initiatives, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 commonly referred to as Title I. Parent involvement is also an important provision in the latest reauthorization of the Leave No Child Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, PL 107-110. Important research on parent involvement is presented in this chapter. Also, a brief discussion of the role parent involvement has played in several important school reform initiatives, such as decentralization, community control, and compensatory education are discussed. Finally, specific recommendations are given for school leaders, superintendents, and principals, on how to use parent involvement to help schools and students make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a requirement of NCLB.

Parental advocacy is an emerging area of research and policy interest in Wales and across the UK. Although there is little research in the UK context to date, international research has indicated that parental advocacy can improve the relationship between parent and professional in the field of child protection social work. This paper aims to ascertain how the implementation of a parental advocacy programme supports parents to play a meaningful role in decision-making when children’s services are working with them and their families.

This study used interviews, surveys and focus groups to obtain qualitative data from 18 parents, seven parent advocates, two advocacy managers and four social workers, to explore the potential impact of parental advocacy on decision-making. The study identified challenges in implementing parental advocacy, particularly relating to awareness of the service. Participants also discussed experiences of the child protection system and how parents are supported by advocates.

Despite challenges surrounding implementation, initial findings were encouraging, and generated examples of how parental advocacy services have helped parents to understand children’s services and develop relationships of trust with social care professionals. In doing so, this study identified potential mechanisms that may be useful to support future service delivery.

This paper and research is novel as it explores parental advocacy within the Welsh context. Although there has been research conducted into parental advocacy, this has largely come from the USA. This research comes from the evaluation of an innovative and promising parental advocacy scheme in Wales.

This study aims to explore how working parents use personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and to identify how technology use might help to support work–family balance.

In-depth telephone interviews with US and UK working parents with children under the age of 18 were conducted.

Findings suggest that personal technology can facilitate work and family activities and reduce work–family conflict by enabling parents to perform certain parenting duties remotely. However, parental attitudes toward technology and children’s rights to privacy influence both technology use and work and family outcomes.

By better understanding employee personal technology use, and how this use facilitates reduced conflict between work and family roles, organizations might look to creatively expand their benefits offerings to include access/discounts to personal technology platforms that support parenting activities (e.g. Uber One, Amazon Prime and DoorDash).

While substantial research has been conducted on employee use of work-enabled technology to facilitate work–life balance, less attention has been paid to how working parents are using personal forms of technology to achieve this same outcome. This exploratory study establishes certain parenting functions that are facilitated by personal technology use and identifies some parental attitudes that influence technology adoption.

Social welfare scholarship has not paid adequate attention to the phenomenon of single-parent women in Asia, especially in terms of their economic and social vulnerabilities. This study aims to explore the strategies employed by women who are single parents to secure their families from socioeconomic issues. It also delves into the experiences and viewpoints of families regarding the social institutions they turn to for assistance during times of hardship – whether it be the state, market, or informal networks.

The data were collected through 33 semi-structured interviews, with informants selected using the purposive sampling technique in South Sumatra Province, Indonesia, from February 2023 to July 2023. This number was obtained based on informants who were included in the criteria the researchers determined, which included “being a female single parent” and “being over the age of 17,” which is the minimum age for Indonesians to marry. Others included “having dependents to support, be they children and/or the respondent’s family” and occupying the main role as “household head” – all of which defined whether someone belongs to the “vulnerable group.”

The study highlights the significance of informal support for single mothers facing economic hardship. Still, overreliance on it can lead to concerns about the sustainability of the everyday social safety net they receive. Social exclusion is also problematic due to societal assumptions about divorce and widowhood. The last highlight is how 'deskilling' among single parents has complicated the challenges women face to re-enter the workforce.

This study’s outcomes provide crucial insights into analyzing the patterns of single-parent families in Indonesia and serve as a framework for further research on the resilience of single parents in developing countries.

Finds research shows that while parents are potentially an important source of information and support to their children on sexual issues, in practice many parents feel that they lack the skills and confidence to play a direct role in these matters. Presents findings from a pilot project undertaken by Health Promotion Wales and FPA Cymru to enhance parents’ sex education skills. Details a series of workshops which were run for groups of parents with differing needs in relation to their children’s sex education. Describes how participants took part in pre‐workshop interviews to identify their concerns and in post‐workshop interviews to assess the impact of the workshops. Presents findings from the workshop evaluations, together with some lessons learned from the project. Advises that the long‐term outcome of the project, a resource pack on sex education for parents, is now available.

The gap between management theory and practice has been much criticized. To help bridge the divide, a synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature is offered, along with an application of the widely used VRIO framework, to contend that developing a focused corporate parenting approach as a core competence serves as a source of competitive advantage for diversified companies.

A synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature is presented, beginning with a discussion of why and how firms diversify; the relative performance of firms that pursue related and unrelated diversification; an application of the resource-based view, core competencies and the VRIO framework; a description of focused corporate parenting as a core competency; a prescription for how diversified firms can implement a focused corporate parenting approach; and implications for research.

Developing a focused corporate parenting approach as a core competence serves as a source of competitive advantage for diversified companies.

The synthesis of empirical, theoretical and practice literature presented provides a foundation for future research into the impact of focused corporate parenting on diversified firm performance.

The paper includes a prescription for how diversified firms can implement a focused corporate parenting approach.

The application of the resource-based view and core competency theories to corporate parenting provides managers with the rationale for and methodology to focus their corporate parenting activities.

Explores the reasons behind parents’ food purchases for their children, relating this to the part that advertising is alleged to play in the purchase of unhealthy food, and in particular the issue of “pester power” or the nag factor. Reports a study of 1530 families in the UK sponsored by the Food Advertising Unit, which explored the questions of whether parents know enough about healthy diets, how they react to pestering, what they think about advertising to children, and the relation of income level to attitudes. Finds that parents do have reservations about advertising to children, with most of them feeling that advertisers manipulate children; but at the same time parents accept this as a fact of life in a consumer society and still feel that they have more influence on their children than do the advertisers.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the similarities and differences in single‐ and dual‐parent family households in their selection and acquisition of children's clothing. Respondents included 247 parents of students enrolled in grades K‐12. Significant differences were found in the following items considered. Lack of money was more of a problem for single‐parent families than for dual‐parent families, p = 0.002. Single‐parent families paid for clothing more often by cheque or cash than did dual‐parent families, p=0.009; dual‐parent families used store credit cards more frequently than single‐parent families, p=0.03. No significant differences were found in sources, important purchase factors or satisfaction when selecting and acquiring children's clothing. For all parents, the four most important factors considered when selecting children's clothing were fit, what the parent likes, care required and price. Please note that in the US most children begin school at age 5 in kindergarten (K); ele‐mentary school continues through age 10 at grade 5; middle school encompasses ages 11–13 in grades 6–8; and high school includes ages 14–17 in grades 9–12.

This research analyses the in‐store behaviour of children and their parents while shopping for children’s clothing. Data were collected by unobtrusively observing and recording the behavior of parents and children in retail stores. Results indicate that a purchase was more likely where both parties were highly involved in the search, the interaction was collaborative, the parent had positive evaluations of quality, price, practicality and style, the child had positive evaluations of price, style and colour, and the salesperson addressed the needs of both the parent and the child. It is recommended that retailers′ strategies for merchandise selection, salesforce training and in‐store promotions, address the needs of both parent and child.

Describes research on the processes and outcomes of consumer socialisation; it investigates the importance of the family as the main socialisation agent for young children. Shows how parents influence child behaviour directly through instruction in consumer skills, indirectly as models of consumer behaviour, and by supervision of the child’s consumer opportunities; also by influencing cognitive abilities, motivating the child to use its cognitive abilities in consumer situations, and teaching consumer skills which are unrelated to cognitive ability. Relates changes in US family demographic patterns to children as consumers: more single‐parent families and working mothers may mean less contact and socialisation of children by parents, while greater ethnic diversity and mixed‐race families affects the way that children are socialised. Test four hypotheses: that parents of younger children engage in less direct instruction of consumer behaviours than parents of older children; that parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing with daughters than with sons; that more highly educated parents engage in more direct consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing than do parents with lower levels of education; and that ethnicity is a factor in parental consumer instruction, co‐shopping and co‐viewing. Discusses the results of the survey questionnaire used for this US study of parents with children between two and eight years old; the results roughly confirm the first three of these four hypotheses.