The Quality of Family Relations in Ensuring Sustainable Education

Family research is crucially important to teacher education and training because it delivers important insights for understanding the conditions of students' socialisation. Changes in family life, like longer working hours of parents, actual loss of adult company in children's life, less time spent on family activities, have raised the question of quality in family relationships. The current article discusses the main aspects of parental practices: care, control and family activities. The study analysed how students and parents understand family care, joint activities, vision of future and the differences of their conceptions. Two ethnic groups - Estonian and Russian families were studied. The current study was based on a questionnaire, which was administered to 4372 students in grades 4 through 12 of secondary schools and 2405 parents. The results were analysed using χ²-test. The results revealed that students worry about their future coping at school and about finishing the school significantly more than parents. There are differences between two ethnic groups - Estonian and Russian: Russian families tend to have higher levels of care and control than Estonian families and relations between children and parents are closer in Russian families as well. The article provides teachers with useful information to work with families of different ethnic groups.