Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which parents of middle and high school students received multiple text messages per week encouraging them to ask their children specific questions tied to their science curriculum. The intervention increased parent–child at-home conversations about science but did not detectably impact science test scores. However, the intervention decreased parent engagement in other, potentially productive, parent behaviors. These findings illustrate that parent engagement interventions are not costless: There are opportunity costs to shifting parental effort.

许多教育干预措施鼓励父母参与孩子的教育，就好像父母的时间和注意力是无限的。但遗憾的是，事实并非如此。成功地鼓励某些父母的投资可能会排挤其他生产性行为。一项随机现场实验 (N = 2,212) 评估了一项干预措施的影响，其中中学生的父母每周收到多条短信，鼓励他们向孩子询问与他们的科学课程相关的具体问题。干预增加了亲子在家中关于科学的对话，但并没有明显影响科学考试成绩。然而，干预减少了父母对其他可能有生产力的父母行为的参与。这些发现说明家长参与干预并非没有成本：