The number of purchases of computers and software in the 1980s might suggest that parents were making an important contribution to their children's educational growth. Among the families we studied, however, these actions alone did not lead to academic computing or, for that matter, to other forms of educational computing. Such actions had to be coupled with other conditions, critical among them being parental encouragement and assistance.

In this chapter we focus on the different kinds of educational help that parents can give children at home. In our study, some parents offered help with academic computing occasionally, but most offered none at all. The exceptions we found demonstrate the positive effects encouragement and assistance had on children's computing efforts. We discuss the conditions – including parental unwillingness and lack of skill – that accounted for why parents did not help. At the end of the chapter, we speculate about the presence of these conditions within newer “generations” of computer families.

From the literature on the involvement of parents in their children's educational development, we isolated six important kinds of involvement at home: provisioning, goal setting, praising, modeling, coaching, and scaffolding.

Provisioning refers to behaviors that produce the material necessities of learning. For academic computing, parental provisioning would include ensuring an adequate computer, ancillary hardware, space and furniture, and appropriate software.