AGI Topics

AGI Parenting Projects

The AGI began convening the AGI Parent Leadership Network in September 2008. Researchers and parent leaders from communities in several states meet every four months at Harvard to learn about relevant research, trade ideas, coach one another, and share examples of their own leadership. Presentations and discussions have covered topics ranging from home-learning lifestyles, to ways of helping schools and holding them accountable. The AGI Parent Leadership Network's main purpose of is to equip parent leaders with ideas and energy for helping others in home communities to help ALL our children succeed. An aspiration is to organze both action and research projects spanning a number of the participating communities.

The AGI “Love-to-Read” survey project was inspired by a participant in the AGI Parent Leadership Network, seeking reading suggestions for his children. Using survey responses from students at Harvard and other universities, the AGI will compile annotated booklists from which teachers, parents, and children can select books that respondents report helped inspire their passion for reading. A particular emphasis is to identify works that help adolescents better understand issues of racial, gender, and social class identity. During the next phase of the project, a much larger number of students at Harvard and other universities will be invited to complete the survey.

The "How I was Parented" project has conducted almost eighty extensive interviews with Harvard students about their lives growing up. The focus is on ways that parents and other key adults have contributed to Harvard students' development as learners and human beings. The project began during the spring semester of 2009. Most interviews so far have been with students at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Education. Interviews with students from other parts of the university will continue through the fall semester of 2009. Reports from the project will highlight a range of important issues, contrasting and comparing the parenting styles that Harvard students from a variety of backgrounds have experienced.

Video Presentations on Parenting

Title	Presenter(s)	Date	Realplayer format	PowerPoint
Achievement-Related Parenting Across Different Immigrant Groups	Vivian Louie	June 2006	video
Aligning resources to enable families to accomplish the tasks that support children in learning in school	William Beardslee	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Does Parenting Contribute to Achievement Gaps?	Ronald Ferguson, Jelani Mandara, Richard Murnane	November 2006	video
Encouraging Family Literacy in Ethnically Diverse and Immigrant Families	Hirokazu Yoshikawa	September 2009	video	powerpoint
Helping High School Dropouts Make Sense of their Lives and Transition into Productive Adulthood.	Robert Clark	June 2007	video
Influencing Ways that Parents Raise Children	Paul Tough	March 2007	video
Institutional and Everyday forms of Discrimination and Achievement Outcomes	Amanda Lewis	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Intergenerational Predictors of the Black-White Achievement Gap in Adolescence	Jelani Mandara	June 2006	video	powerpoint
Interventions for Families	Rick Weissbourd	June 2006	video
Last Year’s Conference and How We’re Building On What We Learned	Ronald Ferguson	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Parent Processes that Support School Readiness	Susan Landry	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Preschool Parent-Child Language Functions and Early School Literacy	Dodie Norton	June 2007	video	powerpoint
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Home Intellectual Lifestyles	Ronald Ferguson	June 2006	video	powerpoint
School Structures, Expectations, and Peer Dynamics in a Multiracial High School	John Diamond	June 2007	video	powerpoint
The Black-White Test Score Differential	Kevin Lang	June 2007	video	powerpoint

Papers on Parenting

Title & Abstract	Author(s)	Date	Paper
A Family-Based Approach to the Prevention of Depressive Symptoms in Children at Risk: Evidence of Parental and Child Change
Objective. Depression in parents is a prevalent and impairing illness that is encountered frequently in medical practice. Children of depressed parents are at risk for psychopathology and other difficulties. A series of recent national reports have recommended the development of prevention efforts targeting children of depressed parents. Yet, to date few controlled prevention studies of depression in children and adolescents have been conducted. In this study, we report the evaluation of two preventive intervention strategies that target children living in homes with depressed parents. Both are public health approaches that were designed to be used by a wide range of practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including pediatricians, internists, school counselors, nurses and mental health practitioners. We adopted a developmental perspective and intervened with families when children were entering the age of highest risk for depression onset (i.e., adolescence).We chose a family-based approach to prevention and sought to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors for early adolescents by increasing positive interactions between parents and children, and by increasing understanding of the illness for everyone in the family. Our prevention approaches were designed to provide information about mood disorders to parents, to equip parents with the skills they need to communicate information to their children, and to open a dialogue with their children about the effects of parental depression. We hypothesized that participation in these prevention programs would result in parental change in child-related behaviors and attitudes about depression and its impact on the family. In addition, we hypothesized that this parental change would produce change in children’s self-understanding, and in children’s depressive symptomatology. Methodology. We conducted a large scale efficacy trial of two manual-based preventive intervention programs that were designed to be used widely in public health settings. These interventions target the relatively healthy children (ages 8 to 15) of parents with mood disorder. Ninety-three families (88.5% of our initial sample), including 121 children, participated in this study through the fourth assessment point. These families were assigned randomly to either a lecture or a clinician-facilitated intervention. Both interventions were specified in manuals. The lecture condition consisted of two separate meetings delivered in a group format without children present. The clinician-facilitated condition consisted of 6-11 sessions, including separate meetings with parents and children and a family meeting in which the parents led a discussion of the illness and of positive steps that can be taken to promote healthy functioning in the children. In addition, telephone contacts or refresher meetings were conducted at 6 to 9 month intervals. In both conditions, psychoeducational material about mood disorders, risk and resilience was presented and efforts were made to decrease feelings of guilt and blame in children. Parents were helped to build resilience in their children through encouraging their friendships, their success outside of the home, and their understanding of parental illness and of themselves. In addition, in the clinician-facilitated condition efforts were made to link the psychoeducational material presented to the family’s own unique illness experience. To address directly how their lives had changed, all family members in both conditions were assessed for psychopathology and for overall functioning at intake, and for psychopathology, functioning, and response to intervention immediately post-intervention, approximately 1 year post-intervention, and again approximately 2.5 years post-intervention. Results. We examined the outcomes of child understanding and internalizing symptomatology, and a number of predictor variables, using repeated measures analyses with generalized estimating equations. We found that parents in both conditions reported significant change in child-related behaviors and attitudes, and that the amount of change reported increased over time from time 3 to time 4 (÷21 = 18.1, p < .001). Moreover, relative to parents in the lecture program (mean number of changes = 6.3), parents in the clinician-facilitated program reported more change in child-related behaviors and attitudes (mean number of changes = 9.8). Children in both conditions reported increased understanding of parental illness due to participation in our intervention programs. There was a positive association between the amount of change children reported in their understanding of parental illness and the number of changes couples reported in child-related behaviors/attitudes (÷21=37.3, p < .0001) (i.e., parents who had changed the most in response to intervention had children who also changed the most). Finally, internalizing scores for all children decreased with increased time since intervention (÷21=7.3, p=.007). In addition, females had higher internalizing scores than males (÷21=5.3, p = .02). There was no significant effect of group on children’s change in internalizing symptomatology (÷21=0.2, p=.69). Conclusions. We enrolled families with relatively healthy children, administered carefully designed preventive interventions that are manual-based and relatively brief, and found that these programs do have long-standing positive effects in how families problem solve around parental illness. Our results show significant benefits from both interventions. Moreover, changes in parents’ perceptions translated directly into changes in children’s own understanding of parental illness. Parental behavior and attitude changes and their connection to child changes in understanding identify an important mediating variable: family change. By increasing children’s understanding of parental mood disorder, our interventions were found to promote resilience-related qualities in these children at risk. This presentation represents the first and only longitudinal primary prevention study of relatively healthy children at risk for psychopathology due to parental mood disorder and demonstrates a significant reduction in risk factors and increase in protective factors in these families over a long time interval – two and a half years. Our results provide support for a family-based approach to preventive intervention.<br />	William R. Beardslee, MD, Tracy R. Gladstone, PhD, Ellen J. Wright, MA, and Andrew b. Cooper, PhD	2003	paper
Adaptation of Preventive Interventions for a Low-Income Culturally Diverse Community
Objective: To describe essential elements in the adaptation of a prevention approach with a high-risk urban sample, chosen to contrast sharply with the primarily middle-class sample in which it had been originally tested. Methods: Key elements of a preventive intervention for families with parental depression were adapted for use in the new context. Results: A sequence of alliance-building events was implemented, involving engagement at three levels – community, caregivers and family. The prevention approach was modified to include: an expanded approach to defining depression; greater flexibility on the part of the clinician; more intensive engagement between clinician and family, with a focus on immediate daily concerns; awareness of cultural issues and responsiveness to the subject\'s experience of violence. Conclusion: Core principles of helping family members to discuss the effects of depression and adversity on family life were affirmed. <br /> <br />	Donna L. Podorefsky, PhD, Marjorie McDonald-Dowdell, R.N., L.I.C.S.W., William R. Beardslee, M.D.	2001	paper
Excellence with Equity
Individuals, families, communities and nations have lifestyles: routine ways of allocating time, effort, attention and resources to activities. In ways that the Union City and Council of Great City Schools examples begin to illustrate, progress in a national movement for excellence with equity will require lifestyle changes in the ways that the nation does schooling. Similarly, for most parents of any racial or social class background, it is not difficult to imagine lifestyle changes likely to raise their children’s achievement (for example, required daily leisure reading, discussions in which children explain their homework answers to parents and appropriate bedtimes, firmly enforced).	Ronald F. Ferguson	October 2005	paper
Intergenerational Predictors of the Black-White Achievement Gap in Adolescence
Intergenerational predictors of the Black-White achievement gap among 2108 adolescents from the NLSY were examined. The results showed that the gaps in SES and achievement significantly reduced over the past few generations. Moreover, grandparents' education and occupational prestige accounted for 20% of the achievement gap, but were completely mediated by parent and adolescent factors. Parents' SES, achievement, and parenting accounted for almost all of the remaining ethnic differences in math and reading scores. Parental demandingness and adolescent health and motivation had particularly large unique effects on achievement. It was concluded that adjusting for these differences across generations would, theoretically, all but eliminate the Black-White test score gap. The need for culturally specific parenting interventions was also discussed.	Jelani Mandara, Nereira Greene, Fatima Varner	2006	paper
PARENTING STYLES AND ACHIEVEMENT The effects of parenting styles on adolescent achievement test scores: Ethnic and gender differences (and similarities)
Objective. The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of parenting styles on Black, White, and Hispanic adolescents achievement test scores. Design. A total of 3290 adolescents and their mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth were assessed on various measures of parenting, math and reading achievement, SES, cognitive stimulation, and child motivation and health. The study also used different measures of demandingness, less extreme classification criteria, more control variables, and a higher proportion of Black and Hispanic youth than in previous studies. Results. Authoritative parenting was associated with high scores for all race and gender groups, even after the background factors were controlled. Authoritarian parenting was not as beneficial to African Americans or as detrimental to European Americans as in previous studies. Permissive and neglectful parenting styles were associated with lower test scores for all groups, especially for African Americans. Consequently, the race gap in achievement was non-existent for those with authoritative parents, but was rather dramatic for those with non-authoritative parents. Conclusion. Baumrind’s conception of authoritative parenting is optimal for all American race and gender groups’ achievement. Parenting interventions that teach this conception of authoritative parenting should be the focus of familybased prevention interventions.	Jelani Mandara	Feb 2007	paper
Pathways to the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
The Pathway to the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect assembles a wealth of findings from research, practice, theory, and policy about what it takes to improve the lives of children and families, particularly those living in tough neighborhoods. By laying out a comprehensive, coherent array of actions, the Pathway informs efforts to improve community conditions within supportive policy and funding contexts.The Pathways framework does not promote a single formula or “silver bullet.” Rather, the emphasis is on acting strategically across disciplines, systems, and jurisdictions to reduce the costs of abuse and neglect and to promote thriving children, families, and communities. The Pathway provides a starting point to guide choices made by community coalitions, services providers, researchers, funders, and policymakers to achieve desired outcomes for children and their families.	Lisbeth B. Schorr,Vicky Marchand	November 14, 2007	paper
The Role of Family Socioeconomic Resources in the Black-White Test Score Gap Among Young Children
This paper reviews evidence on the family origins of racial differences in young children’s test scores and considers how much of the gap is due to differences in the economic and demographic conditions in which black and white children grow up. Our review of the literature finds that the estimated size of the gaps varies considerably across studies. However, a surprisingly consistent result is that a collection of measures related to family socioeconomic resources appears to account for a little less than half a standard deviation of the black-white test score gap, regardless of the assessments used or the populations studied. We discuss the policy implications of these findings and suggest avenues for future research.	Katherine Magnuson, Greg J. Duncan	2006	paper
What Doesn't Meet the Eye
There is much that does not meet the teacher’s eye, but that nonetheless affects how ambitiously and effectively students learn. African American and Hispanic students in MSAN districts have fewer family background advantages on average, compared to whites and Asians. In addition, they have lower grade point averages and report less understanding of their lessons. They have lower homework completion rates than white classmates, but report spending virtually the same amount of time doing homework. Skill gaps and differences in home academic supports, not effort or motivation, appear to be the primary explanations for why they complete less homework and get lower grades than whites. Conversely, part of the reason that Asians complete more homework and get higher grades than other nonwhite groups, is that they devote more time to their studies.	Ronald F. Ferguson	2002	paper