"My Child has Cerebral Palsy": Parental Involvement and Children's School Engagement

Engaged students tend to show school-committed behaviors (e.g., attend classes, get involved with the learning process), high achievement, and sense of belonging. However, students with disabilities are prone to show a lack of engagement with school due to the specific difficulties they have to handle. In fact, children with disabilities are likely to show poor participation in school when compared with children without disabilities. This poor involvement is related to their low autonomy to participate in the school activities, which, in turn, results in low school engagement. Parents play a crucial role in their childrens education. Parental involvement in school activities promotes autonomous behaviors and, consequently, school engagement. In fact, extant literature has shown close relationships between parental involvement, school engagement, and academic performance. Yet, parental involvement in school activities of children with Cerebral Palsy (CP) has received little direct attention from researchers. These children tend to display lower participation due to the motor, or cognitive, impairments that compromise their autonomy, and have a high likelihood to develop learning disabilities, with special incidences in reading and arithmetic. Therefore, our aim is twofold, to understand the parental styles; and how the perceived parental involvement in school activities is related to their children school engagement. Hence, 19 interviews were conducted with one of the parents of 19 children with CP. These interviews explored the school routines of children and the perceived involvement of parents in those routines. Additionally, children filled out a questionnaire on school engagement. Results show that the majority of the parents were clustered in the Autonomy Allowance and Acceptance and Support parental style, and the majority of their children were perceived as autonomous. Moreover, about a half of the children reported a high level of school engagement. Finally, neither childrens autonomous behaviors reported
This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (FOCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). AP was supported by a PhD fellowship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT - SFRH/BD/95104/2013). PM was supported by a Post-Doctoral fellowship from the Research Center on Psychology (CIPsi), School of Psychology, University of Minho.
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