MOTIVATE

Descriptors

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Motivate includes the parenting practices which promote intellectual development in children. Parents who take their responsibility as their children's teacher seriously, and who perform their teaching functions effectively and sensitively throughout their children's lives, are more likely than other parents to have children who become confident and skilled learners and who attain high levels of educational achievement.

The Motivate cluster of skills is closely related to Guide and Nurture. Parents who are the most successful motivators lovingly nurture and guide their children respectfully and sensitively. The parenting practices promoted in the Motivate cluster may be especially responsive to parent education. Parents can learn how to facilitate learning effectively.

The Critical Motivate Practices

• Teach children about themselves, others, and the world around them.
• Stimulate curiosity, imagination, and the search for knowledge.
• Create beneficial learning conditions.
• Help children process and manage information.

Examples of Specific Program Objectives for Motivate

The following parent behaviors serve as examples of more specific outcome objectives based on the critical practices for Motivate:

• Identify why they are the first and potentially the most important teachers for their children.
• Establish a home environment conducive to learning.
• Help their children acquire knowledge and skills they need to become responsible, contributing young people and adults.
• Stimulate their children's curiosity and desire to learn.
• Increase their children's confidence as learners.
• Promote their children's preparation for success in school.
• More accurately identify their children's learning patterns and learning needs.
• Engage their children in more language-rich activities.
• Increase the number of appropriate learning experiences they provide for their children.
• Use more encouraging and supportive responses to their children's learning efforts.
• Establish more realistic, achievable homework and study rules.
• Play more learning games with infants and preschoolers.
• Increase interest in, and knowledge of, their children's schools and school achievement.
• Interact more effectively with their children's schools and teachers.

What We Know about Motivate

Children need opportunities to learn. Infants, preschoolers, and school-age children are more likely to become skilled and motivated learners if their parents provide them with opportunities for a variety of experiences which stimulate sensory, physical, and intellectual learning (Caldwell and Bradley, 1979; Honig, 1979).

In their summary of the research, Amato and Ochiltree (1986) found child competence to be associated with a variety of parental behaviors. Able parents encourage their children to explore and interact with the environment. They give their children responsive and realistic feedback. They are warm and supportive. They have high expectations for their children and assist with schoolwork. They also take an active problemsolving approach to resolving conflict and create an environment that is relatively free of overt conflict between family members.

Steinberg et al., (1989) found that the three aspects of authoritative parenting_acceptance, psychological autonomy, and behavioral control_may enhance an adolescent's work orientation and ultimately school success. In his review of the research, Powell (1991) pointed out that the most beneficial teaching strategies stimulate the child's own thinking and encourage active, verbal engagement of a task.

In a study of parent beliefs about their children's academic experience, Powell and Peet (1992b) found that a majority of parents are worried about their child's future, and approximately one-third do not expect their child will attain what the parent considers to be an ideal position for the child. They also found that a parent's contributions to children's learning are most effective when incorporated into daily family routines.

Learning is enhanced by responsiveness. Teaching is most effective if provided by parents/caregivers who are aware of and responsive to their children's specific learning patterns, needs, and capabilities. Controlling and restrictive parents undermine children's intellectual development by restricting children from freely exploring their environment (Clarke-Stewart, 1973; Dornbusch et al., 1987; Gottfried, 1983; Jennings and Conners, 1989; Ramey and Finkelstein, 1978; Sparling, 1980).

Language and literacy skills are probably the most important predictors of children's educational success. Children whose parents have promoted their language and literacy throughout preschool and early school years are most likely to achieve in school and beyond (Becker, 1985; Clarke-Stewart, 1977; Greaney, 1986; Hess and Holloway, 1984; Honig, 1982; Laosa, 1982; Tizard and Hughes, 1984).

Children who have access to reading and writing materials, who have parents who read frequently to them and take them to the library have been found to be more skilled readers than children who do not experience these encouragements (Powell, 1991).

Home-school collaboration is critical. When parents collaborate with their children's teachers, these children are more likely to adjust to and succeed in school (Cotton and Savard, 1982; ERIC Clearinghouse, 1985; Hamilton and Cochran, 1988; Schmitt, 1986; Rodick and Henggeler, 1980).

Reasonable and positive expectations build a foundation for success. Children are more likely to be achieving learners if their parents have high but reasonable learning expectations for them (Coopersmith, 1967; Phillips, 1987; Steinberg, Elmen, and Mounts, 1989). "Hothousing," exerting inappropriate levels of achievement pressure on young children, creates an artificial environment and is likely to be counterproductive (Sigel, 1982).

Parents have a role as interpreters of objective confidence feedback for their children. Children incorporate their parents' impressions of their capabilities into their own self-appraisal of their academic competence. Parent's opinions are even more important than actual records of achievement (Philips, 1987).