This is a tricky question for me to answer.
If you asked my parents if education was important to them, they would say yes. Yet my dad used to threaten to not drive me to school whenever he was mad at me. Go figure.
They would ask us occasionally if we were doing well in school. But didn’t always ask to see our report card or anything.
I think it partly had to do with them being immigrants. They assumed that their children understood the system more than they did. And trusted us to monitor our own progress.
This worked fine for me and my sisters. Didn’t work very well for my brother who would often lie.
Help with homework was a struggle because of the language barrier. While I spoke both languages fairly well on a day-to-day basis, calculus terminology was a whole ‘nother thing.
It ended up with my dad yelling at me that he was an engineer and that he wasn’t stupid. And me in tears saying that I didn’t think he was stupid. Just that I only learned these calculus terms in English. Didn’t ask for help again.
When we moved and transferred schools, I asked them to change schools because the new school was so bad. The work I was doing in Spanish class was two years behind. And I was tutoring seniors in math as a sophomore. People were sleeping in class and the teacher didn’t even care. Heck…one time a guy left and came back with a burrito and the teacher didn’t even care.
My parents didn’t understand that not all schools were at the same level. They just wanted me to try my hardest and that was good enough for them. I had to get my school counselor and a social worker involved to get transferred to another school on my own.
So…they would say education was important to them. But they didn’t do much to help the process. But maybe the lack of help made me more independent? Who knows.