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Family
Parents play an influential role in their adolescents’ lives in a variety of ways. They
send messages about the importance of school, reinforce these messages in the
home, and either involve themselves directly in their children’s education or do
not. Many students spoke about their parents’ expectations about schooling, both
in terms of the role it should play in their lives, as well as expectations about
academic performance. As expectations become internalized, students continue to
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set similar standards for themselves. Whereas in the earlier years of adolescence,
students talk about clearly expressed parental expectations, by later adolescence
students themselves give voice to these expectations.
A ninth-grade female raised in a single-parent household talked about the impor-
tance of living up to the high standards her mother had set:
It hasn’t been too hard (to do well in school), and I haven’t wanted to let
my mom down. If you don’t live up to people’s expectation, you feel bad, and
if you do bad, you know the reason for it, and you say okay, I got to do better
next time. When you get to the level that you want to be, you feel a lot better.
A 14-year-old male in East City said that his parents ‘‘believe very strongly in edu-
cation. They want me to do well. Basically A or B. They expect that of me and
I expect that of myself. I would not appreciate a C or lower.’’ Many of the stu-
dents interviewed, when they specified performance standards, described aca-
demic goals that were more moderate. A Springdale student, for example, said,
‘‘My mom is not adamant about perfect grades, but she is adamant about grades
that will get me by.’’
A male student at Hamilton said that he was motivated by his desire to work with
kids in the future and that required him to do well in school. He also described
the more extrinsic motivation provided by his parents, a common feature in many
families. Asked what would happen if he started making bad grades in school, he
said, ‘‘Well, first the sports would go, then other privileges, until I figured out
what I wanted to do. There definitely would be consequences.’’ Other students
described responses that were less punitive. Another ninth-grade student at Hamil-
ton, a female, said in response to the same question:
My parents would ask me what is wrong, and they would work with me a
lot more. Right now they allow me to be pretty independent in my studies,
but if my grades went down they would try to help me understand the mate-
rial. My parents are very supportive.
In most families, parents relax their supervision over time, allowing for growing
independence and internalization of academic standards. A high school junior at
Springdale described this transition in his home:
When I was younger they used to say, do your homework and stuff. Now I
am on my own. If I do not do it, then I do not do it; it is a personal decision.
I think that if it became a problem, and I was not doing it often enough, then
they would get firm about it, but as long as it gets done, they kind of let it
go.
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Future expectations.
In many families, the motivation for academic success in ado-
lescence is derived from expectations about the future value of education. For
those whose parents attended college, this is the unquestioned and unchallenged
path for their children. A female senior in East City, accepted to nursing school
for the following fall, said that both her parents had gone to college and that
‘‘Going to college is an absolute necessity. There was never a choice. It’s ex-
pected.’’
The expectation that students will excel academically in order to attend college
is also strong in those households where parents did not have this opportunity
for themselves and who have dedicated themselves to providing it for their chil-
dren. Another East City high school senior, neither of whose parents had attended
college and who had just been accepted to a university where she will major in
education, commented, ‘‘Education is very important. You don’t get bad grades.
In my family, it’s not really an option to slack off.’’ Education is viewed by most
adults as the path to upward mobility, and this is a particularly powerful message
in many immigrant households:
My mom wants me to have the chance at the things she did not have a chance
at. Like now she is going back to college, because she didn’t get that chance.
She came here from Jamaica when she was 20 and she had to start work
immediately. So she got her GED, and now she’s going to college. She doesn’t
want me to go through what she went through and she tells me that ‘You
better get yours now.’ (Ninth-grade male, Hamilton)
Students may also be influenced, both negatively and positively, by older siblings
and the values they hold about education. One ninth-grade student conveyed the
importance this has for her:
Don’t tell my stepsister, but I look up to her a lot. She is everything I would
want to be. She does everything, she can do hair, but her grade point is like
3.9 or 4.0, and it is like colleges, colleges, colleges. She used to run track, but
now she knows that though she is a runner, she isn’t the best. She is really
into math now, she is taking AP biology and everything like that. So sometimes
I stay up and watch her. I try to take everything in, because she’ll be leaving
to go to college next year.
Parents who did not finish high school themselves may see the attainment of a
high school diploma as a primary goal for their children. For example, one mother
of an eighth-grader spoke of her own regrets about dropping out when she be-
came pregnant as a teenager and how strongly she felt about her own daughter
completing high school. For some parents, this goal has become an end in itself,
and little discussion followed about what these students might be able to do with
the diploma after graduation.
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