parental attitudes

Parenting style influences child development and social mobility

A growing body of research suggests that good parenting skills and a supportive home learning environment are positively associated with children’s early achievements and wellbeing. Hence interventions to improve the quality of home and family life can increase social mobility.

This briefing looks at how parenting styles affects child development and social mobility.

Children and parents: media use and attitudes report

Report designed to give an accessible overview of media use, attitudes and understanding among children and young people aged 5-15. It also documents the views of parents/carers about their child’s media use, and the rules, tools and other ways that parents manage such use.

The document is based principally on findings from Ofcom’s media literacy tracker conducted in spring 2015. Where possible, within the sample of children aged 5-15 and their parents, demographic analysis is conducted by age of the child interviewed, by gender and by household socio-economic group.

Raised expectations: parental experiences of short breaks

Report that provides a snapshot of the experiences of parents of disabled children in order to highlight examples of good practice and identify possible areas of concern.

Findings do not cover a representative sample, so cannot reflect the progress of the short breaks programme as a whole, but provide real life examples of the way that impact can be made on the ground.

The influence of parents, places and poverty on educational attitudes and aspirations

Report that aims to better understand the relationship between young people’s aspirations and how they are formed.

It examines the nature of aspirations; explores how parental circumstances and attitudes, school, and opportunity structures come together to shape aspirations in deprived urban areas; and argues that the approach to intervention should be reconsidered.

Parenting matters: early years and social mobility

Paper that argues strongly that the government is correct to take the bold step of embracing the firm evidence on child development in seeking to create a strategy that "sets out plans to support a culture where the key aspects of good parenting are widely understood and where all parents can benefit from advice and support...what is needed is a much wider culture change towards recognising the importance of parenting, and how society can support mothers and fathers to give their children the best start in life".

Parents at the centre

Report undertaken to understand why some parents who are entitled to use early years services don’t normally do so. More specifically, the research seeks to understand how parents access information that shapes their decision-making about early years provision, and how service providers can better engage with and support parents to meet their families’ needs. On the basis of the findings, the case is made for a number of key policy changes, to ensure that early years provision enables children from low-income families to break out of the inter-generational cycle of disadvantage.