The relationship between father involvement and children's academic performance

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to study the impact of the quality of the father-child relationship on children's academic performance. A total of 58 fathers and their children (in the fifth and sixth grades) participated in this study. The fathers completed a questionnaire, "Quality of family interaction - fathers' perspective" and the children completed a questionnaire "Father-child interaction". To investigate how the fathers' involvement affected their children's academic performance, the children were evaluated using the School Performance Test. The results indicate that, the higher the frequency of father-child communication and the greater the fathers' involvement in the children's school, cultural and leisure activities, the higher the children's academic performance. These results indicate the importance of fathers' involvement, to maximize children's academic performance, and the necessity of educating men with respect to the ways in which they can improve their parental performance.