ABSTRACT
This chapter presents findings from an original survey of parents engaged in an unprecedented form of involvement—educating their children at home during the COVID pandemic. In spring and summer 2020, media descriptions conveyed a haphazard response to COVID by schools and overwhelmed parents scrambling to teach their children and maintain their employment. Parents clearly were more involved in their children’s education during remote learning, but the extent of required involvement—2.5 hours a day—was not as great as one might have believed after reading contemporary media reports. Moreover, our results suggest the experience was, on average, not as debilitating as portrayed. Parents were surprisingly sanguine about their experience educating their children at home. This may have been due to the response of schools in providing various resources and maintaining regular contact with students. We conclude by discussing what these results portend for parental involvement in years to come.
