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Abstract
Parent engagement is the process by which a person’s biological parents or caretakers become active participants in their education. Parent engagement can constitute direct contact with their children’s school, engagement in the home, or other educational activities that occur in other settings. Scholars who have focused on how Black parents engage with their children’s educators, administrators and schooling processes have contributed important findings that enhance our understanding of how a parent’s racial background can impact their engagement experience. While all those perspectives are crucial to our view of the relationships that parents have with their children’s educations, we continue to have limited information on how children, the beneficiaries of these efforts, make sense of their parents’ engagement. This research study of 7 undergraduate African American males attending a selective public university in the Southeast examined how they described their parents’ engagement practices during their primary and secondary schooling years. Using semi-structured interviews as the primary mode of data collection, findings from a thematic analysis of the data collected are (1) that parents’ expectations set the stage for participant academic success, (2) that all parents were engaged during the participants’ primary schooling years, (3) that students developed a sense of independence and became drivers of their own education as they grew older, (4) that students experienced a shift in their parents’ engagement as they transitioned to college, and (5) that students’ racial identities as Black males impacted their schooling experience.