A typology of parental involvement in education centring on children and young people: negotiating familialisation, institutionalisation and individualisation

This article explores the widespread emphasis on parental involvement in education from the perspectives of children and young people. In contrast to the conceptualisation of children as variable social actors, policy initiatives to link home and school more effectively, and research-generated typologies of parental involvement, unthinkingly familialise and institutionalise children by ignoring any part they may play in parental involvement in their education. Drawing on data from our study of children's understandings of home-school relations, we develop and elaborate a typology that centres on the complex ways that children and young people talk about creating, acceding to, and resisting their parents' involvement in their education. The socially patterned differences between the children and young people's understandings and experiences demonstrate how the broad social processes of familialisation, institutionalisation and individualisation are, in fact, concretely lived and negotiated in variable ways. Nevertheless, there are also some commonalities in children and young people's resistance around notions of privacy.