The paradox of parents’ involvement in their children’s time at university

Over the past few decades, there has been – as many an academic will attest – a significant shift in the extent to which parents are involved in their children’s higher education.

Parents now often attend university open days with their children, with some institutions laying on separate talks and events for them. Moreover, despite the introduction of tuition fees and maintenance loans, many parents end up making some financial contribution to their child’s higher education.

To date, however, we know relatively little about parents’ perspectives on their involvement, nor about the extent to which they support their children in non-financial ways once they have embarked on their higher education journey. Research that I have recently completed (with Julia Cook and Dan Woodman) on parents of Australian higher education students may be transferable to the UK, given the similarities between the two higher education systems and social structures more generally.

Drawing on data from the longitudinal Life Patterns project, which has been following the lives of young Australians since the 1990s, we asked parents with children in higher education – or shortly to enrol – a series of questions about the support, if any, they were offering their children, as well as whether they felt parents should be supporting their children in any particular ways. Their responses were fascinating.

Independence and intervention

Nearly all of those we spoke to believed that higher education was a space in which young people learned how to be independent – and it was this that helped to distinguish it from school. University was typically positioned as a space where their children would “fend for themselves”, engage in “adult learning”, and be accountable for their own actions.

However, while there was a strong rhetorical commitment to higher education as a time of achieving independence, when describing the detail of their parenting practices our participants outlined a wide range of ways in which they had been closely involved in the lives of their student children (or thought a parent should be), providing high levels of practical and emotional support.

All of those we interviewed were either already providing financial support to their offspring at university, or they had clear plans to do so when their children enrolled. In addition, they either had already spent, or thought it was desirable to spend, considerable time with their children supporting them through any problems they encountered during their studies. This differed between participants but often included “coaching” approaches, to help the child identify the root cause of problems; strong encouragement to take advantage of the various services available on campus – sometimes with detailed advice about how best to access these; and, in a significant number of cases, direct involvement in academic matters, including paying for private tutors.

The following excerpts from our interviews are illustrative:

Yeah, we would help [daughter] through that and … make a timetable for her for the week on how she could help with the study. …. So she’s not thinking it’s all got to be done in a short amount of time.

The other thing we could do is investigate some tutoring if that’s required.

None of our interviewees remarked on the apparent paradox between the rhetorical foregrounding of “independence”, on the one hand, and the numerous examples of parental intervention, on the other. This is perhaps unsurprising. It does, however, raise the interesting question of why these parents continued to see university as a space of independence given the various forms of support they were giving their child (or thought should be given).

Defining distances

In answering this question, we can first point to the dominance of discourses about independence. Despite the well-documented changes to young people’s lives over recent decades and the associated later age at which the traditional markers of adulthood are on average now reached, independence as an achievement of early adulthood retains considerable discursive power. Admitting that one’s child is “semi-dependent”, or similar, while at university may thus be viewed as admitting or that an adult child is struggling and even that one has “failed” as a parent.

Relatedly, it appears that there continues to be some social opprobrium associated with acknowledging that one intervenes in the life of one’s son or daughter once they reach the age for higher education. This is alluded to in the following comment from one of our interviewees:

Kids get older, they’re more mature than you think. You don’t want to be seen as mothering your children, I don’t want to be that umbrella parent that’s hanging over them all the time saying ‘do go do this’ or ‘you should do that’.

Both structural factors (such as having to pay tuition fees, and the high cost of university housing) and cultural influences (such as the expectation that parents take responsibility for monitoring their child’s educational progress) likely encourage parents to continue to intervene quite significantly in the lives of their student-children. Yet it appears that these participants were nevertheless keen to discursively distance themselves from such behaviours.

These findings provide new insights into how parenting practices are shifting over time. They may also have broader political and policy implications. Our sample was broadly middle class and we would speculate that the interventions outlined above may not be available to all students – particularly those from families with no prior experience of higher education. Universities thus need to be aware that some students may be being supported in their academic endeavours by parents, and this may serve to exacerbate social inequalities. Can more support be offered within universities to those without such familial resources?

With respect to more general policy debates, for those who believe that the student loan should be increased (or grants restored) to cover costs currently often picked up by parents, arguments may be harder to make if the actual degree of parental contribution is masked by the discourse of “independence”. There may therefore be some advantage to being more open about the degree of parental support, with respect to finances at least.