Research conducted in recent decades has shown the importance of
parental involvement in pupils’ well-being, learning, and future
academic success as well as their cognitive, social, and emotional
development. In addition to these benefits, parental involvement
practices improve parental confidence and satisfaction as well as
enriching educational programmes, enhancing the climate of educational
institutions, and easing teachers’ work burden through
responsibility-sharing and increased information flow. Although the
significant role of parental involvement is well-supported by various
studies, some research reveals that a gap continues to exist between the
recommendations of related research and what is practised in
educational institutions in reality. This gap explains in part the
persistence of insufficient parental involvement practices. This paper,
which is based on my public lektio aims to gain a better understanding
of early childhood educators’ self-reported reasons for insufficient
practices as well as identifying their parental involvement practices
and their views in Finnish and Turkish contexts. The study is reported
in four original articles, using the quantitative and qualitative data
gathered from a representative sample of 287 early childhood educators
from Helsinki and 225 early childhood educators from Ankara. Analysis of
the results drew attention to the gap between theory and practice as
well as the reasons behind this gap from the educators’ point of view.
All the data material were discussed for each context, thus allowing for
the highlighting of practical implications, which contributed not only
to the research on parental involvement practices in different countries
but also to the research on identifying factors affecting sufficient
parental involvement. In addition to country-centred interpretations,
the comparative aspect of this study contributes to existing research
into world culture vs. local culture discussions.