Despite a clear association between parental involvement and children's educational and mathematical outcomes, prior attempts to establish whether parents' homework help hinders or promotes children's mathematical achievement have yielded inconsistent results. Aiming to address this ambiguity, the current article examines the link between children's mathematical achievement level and development and parents' homework help, contextualised by parental educational attainment and attitudes towards achievement (proxied by values and encouragement). For this purpose, data sourced from two mathematics tests completed by elementary school children (age 10−15), along with child and parent surveys (N = 796) conducted one year apart, was subjected to structural equation model analysis, including a latent change score model. The obtained findings revealed a positive correlation between children's mathematical achievement level and their parents' educational attainment as well as achievement attitudes (encouragement and values), while the correlation with the parents' homework help was negative. However, children who received more help with homework achieved the greatest gains in their mathematical development from the first to the second year. This apparent contradiction is explored in this article, and further implications of the parents' homework help are discussed, taking into account their educational attainment as well as values and encouragement.
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Fiskerstrand et al. (2025) studied this question.
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