On the Problems of the Conceptual Apparatus in Research on Parenting in Education

Abstract

The article is devoted to analyzing some key constructs describing various aspects of parenting activity that are used in interdisciplinary research on child education. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the development of the conceptual apparatus, clarify the meanings and areas of application of key constructs describing parenting, and highlight the latest trends in research on parenting in education. The authors did a bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science and Scopus databases to identify these key constructs and selected 12 114 articles. As a result, three clusters of key concepts have been identified. The first includes constructs that characterize features of the interaction between the parent and the child (primarily parental styles) in the context of education. In the second cluster, parental activity is assessed “from the school’s perspective”; parental involvement is the essential concept. The third cluster includes concepts from the most recent publications that discuss the poles of well-being and stress for children and parents in the context of education. For further analysis, we selected fourteen constructs most often used in the English-language scientific literature: parenting styles, parent-child relationship, parental attachment, parental support, parenthood, parental practices, parental involvement, parental engagement, parental beliefs, parental education, parent training, parental stress, parent-child interaction, parental participation. The article reviews the path taken by researchers from the first half of the 20th century to 2021 and analyses dominant ideas about parents’ contribution to the development of children at different stages of the evolution of science and the prospects for research on parenting in the near future.

Acknowledgments. Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.