Parent Engagement Interventions Are Not Costless: Opportunity Cost and Crowd Out of Parental Investment

Abstract

Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which parents of middle and high school students received multiple text messages per week encouraging them to ask their children specific questions tied to their science curriculum. The intervention increased parent–child at-home conversations about science but did not detectably impact science test scores. However, the intervention decreased parent engagement in other, potentially productive, parent behaviors. These findings illustrate that parent engagement interventions are not costless: There are opportunity costs to shifting parental effort.

A manifesto for applying behavioural science

“…We can try to gain a better understanding of the system interactions and anticipate how they may play out, perhaps through "dark logic" exercises that try to trace potential harms rather than just benefits 63 . For example, we might anticipate that sending parents text messages encouraging them to talk to their children about the school science curriculum may achieve this outcome at the expense of other school-supporting behaviours-as turned out to be the case 64 . Engaging the people who will implement and participate in an intervention will be a key part of this effort.…”

Parents’ Perceptions of UK Forest School: Descriptive and Evaluative Aspects

“…The tension that is revealed along all dimensions possibly has a root cause: parents are especially mindful of opportunity costs. Parents personally endure opportunity costs when they engage in their children's education [39], and they consider opportunity costs when they make schooling choices for their children, such as the time that their children could devote to other activities [40]. The tension revealed in our research may in the end reflect the parents' desire to make the most of the money and time invested in an educational activity, while taking into account other activities that could have been engaged in.…”

An investigation of Head Start preschool children's executive function, early literacy, and numeracy learning in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Many parents, particularly mothers, reduced work hours or delayed seeking new employment after a layoff in order to care for children at home during the pandemic ( Alon et al, 2020 ). Reallocating parents’ time comes with costs ( Robinson et al, 2022 ). Such shifts may have bolstered preschoolers’ learning, but with negative side effects such as lower household financial stability and parental stress from ‘homeschooling.’ Extra work undertaken by teachers may also have buttressed children's learning, but with a cost of increased staff burnout risk ( Hanno et al, 2022 ).…”