School-based parental involvement is a common practice in the United States, and yet there is an emerging view that parents’ involvement in schools may have little if any academic benefit for their children. However, such conclusions are often based on narrowly construed survey questions, such as “Did you attend PTA in the past year?”. In our study, we re-examine commonly used measurements of school-based parental involvement using 130 interviews with parents and administrators across three diverse elementary schools. We compare conventional survey measures of school-based parental involvement with our own qualitative assessments of parental efficacy. Notably, we find that highly efficacious parents employed a wide range of involvement strategies, undetected by some traditional metrics of involvement (i.e., attending PTA meetings). As expected, we also find that efficacious parents were largely advantaged themselves and concentrated in advantaged schools. However, school contexts can play a powerful role in shaping the reception of parents’ engagement with schools—the presence of a Spanish immersion program transformed how teachers and administrators interpreted the involvement activities of Latinx parents. Our results point to the importance of (1) recasting parental involvement as parental efficacy and (2) integrating school contexts to understand how efficacy can be more effectively encouraged and deployed.

With more than one million couples transitioning to parenthood each year, finding ways to enable healthier transitions is salient. Trait mindful awareness and sexual mindfulness were examined in an Actor Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) framework using 169 mixed-sex, married couples to evaluate their association with individual, relational, and parental outcomes. For couples who have transitioned to parenthood, mothers’ trait mindfulness was associated with their own higher mental health and fathers; trait mindfulness was associated with their own higher quality mental health; mothers’ and fathers’ sexually mindful nonjudgment, an ability to remain mindful during sex, was associated with fathers’ higher quality mental health and mothers’ sexually mindful nonjudgment was associated with their own higher quality mental health. Mothers’ trait mindfulness was also associated with their report of lower pregnancy and delivery stress. Higher reports of sexual nonjudgement by both mothers and father were also associated with higher parenting satisfaction for fathers. Thus, mindfulness and sexual mindfulness may be particularly important skills to support new parents’ mental health, relational satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and parenting satisfaction. Transition to parenthood scholars and practitioners have long been invested in understanding risk and protective factors for new parents and are commonly seeking important points of education and/or intervention to support this transition. Our study suggests mindfulness may both reduce risk and promote healthy behaviors that support mothers, fathers, and their relationship.