Abstract
<p>Schools and education policymakers have long recognized the importance of parents’ contributions to children’s learning, academic success, and healthy socioemotional development. Yet the widely used construct parent engagement is conceptually diffuse, with limited agreement about its defining features, its distinction from related constructs such as parent involvement, and the processes through which it develops and influences children. To address these limitations, we propose an Integrative Multidimensional Motivational Model of Parent Engagement and Disaffection in Child Education. The model integrates and builds on insights from current theories of parent involvement and engagement, as well as various engagement models from educational, organizational, and environmental psychology literatures. It takes a ‘self-in-role’ perspective, considering how parents’ function in relation to two distinct education-related roles: the parent-as-coeducator role and the parent-as-school-community-member role. For each role, the model distinguishes engagement from disaffection as distinct states of functioning; disaffection conceptualized not merely as the absence of engagement, but as the presence of specific maladaptive processes and states. Engagement and disaffection are further conceptualized as multidimensional psychological phenomena that capture the quality of parents’ experience and enactment of each role with distinct emotional, cognitive, and behavioral (conative) components. The model also frames parent engagement and disaffection as malleable context-dependent states arising from parents’ interactions with people, objects and symbols in their surrounding contexts. These contextual conditions are expected to shape parents’ engagement and disaffection through their appraisals of competence, autonomy, and relatedness while enacting each role. In turn, the model hypothesizes that parent engagement and disaffection influence children by shaping the relational, motivational, and educational conditions through which children’s own psychological needs and academic functioning are supported or undermined. We close the article by discussing the theoretical and applied implications of the proposed model and its potential for advancing the field of parent engagement.</p>