The Role of Parents in the Implementation of Guidance and Counseling Services Technology during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, guidance and counseling teachers are demanded to keep running counseling services using various alternatives of online learning applications. At the same time, parents as the main assistants in the online counseling process should actively encourage their children to have active participation. It is because the majority of parents consider that all the things related to school activities are totally teachers’ responsibility. Thus, the present study attempted to find, reveal, and describe the role of parents in the implementation of supporting technology for online counseling services during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, the researchers adopted an online survey method and cross-sectional technique to analyze the data of 350 student's parents in Semarang Regency as the respondents of this study. Generally, the findings indicated that parents with high level of understanding tend to provide great support for the online counseling services given to their children.


Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected educational policies determination.
One of which is the online learning policy. Online learning is often held via google classroom, zoom, educational television, interactive learning on rumah belajar, ruang guru and other online learning applications. This condition also urges counseling services as one of school instrument which plays a crucial role to implement online services. Putra and Shofaria (2020) argue that the latest educational model, namely Study From Home (SFH) is not supposed to be used as an alternative medium to do face-to-face meeting while guidance and counseling teachers are doing Work From Home (WFH). Instead, online guidance and counseling services should be done meaningfully and given to optimize students' development in achieving their developmental tasks through the utilization of some online platforms available on the internet.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, counselors can empower students from stress, anxiety, and other problems using technology and social media, such as providing consultation videos (Greenhalgh et al., 2020). Surely, this condition forces students to learn from home, while parents must prepare supporting devices for the counseling services, such as smartphone, internet quota, and other supporting facilities for the success of learning process (Gunawan, et al., 2020). Therefore, technology utilization in the online guidance and counseling must be the answer for challenges and issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson & Johnson (2011) mention that parental support is an important element of education because parents can be relied on for assistance, support, and acceptance when students encounter difficulties or problems. Based on the previous studies, parental engagement is influenced by (1) beliefs that parents are strongly needed and related to the success of students' education (A'la & Subhi, 2016); (2) perceptions of the available time at home (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005;Syaiful, 2020). Hence, it is important to know the role of parents in the counseling services since it is interactive and constructive processes between parents and experts indicated by collaborative efforts and common responsibilities and accountability.
Parents' position in learning and personality development of students has been the concern of researchers. Mutmainnah (2012) states that children personality potential is related to parenting style and environment. Parents must be present to give their best efforts for their children, such as finding the best school and love so that chidren can pass the developmental tasks, including having self-awareness and knowledge of their environment. Specifically, Lilawati (2020) in her study describes parental role in supporting children learning activities. Her study found several roles of parents during the implementation of SFH during this pandemic, such as learning motivators and facilitators for learning engagement. Even though previous two studies were done to early childhood population, the ideas can be used to consider the importance of parents in their children learning, including online counseling services.
A study by Umar (2015) found that parents are the main person in charge of children's education and future determiners. They hold a significant role to determine children educational success so that parents' role and responsibility take place in guiding the execution of specified programs. Certainly, parents must be able to guide their children to study at home, such as by providing monitoring, assistance of school work management, fulfilling children's learning instrument and infrastructure for online counseling services. Another study is from (Beck, et al., 2014;Kong, 2018) which identified parents' understanding, parental support, and the effectiveness of online counseling. This study aimed to determine, reveal and describe the role of parents in the implementation of supporting technology in online counseling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Regarding the previous elaboration, the hypothesis of this study is the level of parents' understanding in the technology utilization in guidance and counseling during the COVID-19 pandemic will influence the support for the online counseling services implementation.

The Role of Parents
During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents must be present to accompany their children learning process at home, including during online counseling session. This form of engagement is realized as an effort to increase the effectiveness of counseling services.
It is because, in the scope of school, parents are structured, collaborative and problemsolving partners between counselors (in this case is guidance and counseling teachers) and other parents who have consultations (Sheridan, et. al., 1996). This definition implies that the role of parents in the counseling is an interactive and constructive process along with some experts (Idol, et al., 1994) indicated by collaborative efforts as well as common responsibility and accountability (Reschly & Christenson, 2012). To sum up, the previous studies found that parental engagement is influenced by 1) beliefs that parents are strongly needed and related to the success of students' education, and 2) perceptions of the available time at home (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005). In line with (Borutp, et. al, 2013), parental engagement in online learning process is necessary to help students do time management. This must be done because parents play a role as an important element to support school educational services (Diniaty, 2017).

The Application of Services Technology During the COVID-19 Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world in 2020, schools were closed and learning process was shifted to study from home. Facing this unexpected situation, many countries immediately changed their learning system to online learning (Starkey, et al., 2021). Thus, technology utilization becomes the efficient way to adopt as means of counseling services implementation (Haryati, 2020;Lin & Wang, 2012). In this way, counseling services will be done virtually or online without any physical contact and face-to-face meeting between counselees (in this case is student) or parents with counselors (guidance and counseling teachers).
Online counseling through the utilization of technology provides a sense of security because counselees can join the services within their environment and even in a critical condition (Centore & Milacci, 2008). It should be kept in mind that technologyintegrated counseling requires counselees to have assistants. Thus, parents' role in the implementation of technology in counseling services is significant to be studied. Of this technological implementation, school counselors can cope with students' stress, anxiety, and problems by using technology and social media, such as consultation videos (Greenhalgh et al., 2020). It is expected that the utilization of technological development in the scope of guidance and counseling can answer challenges and issues that occur during the pandemic.

Method
The present study used a survey method with cross-sectional technique given to students' parents all over Semarang Regency amounted to 350 people. Their data were collected online using google form.
Parental perception of learning designed by Kong (2018)  Prior its distribution, the instrument has been through several adoption processes based on Lenz' concepts (2017), namely 1) forward translation, 2) translation review, decentralization and reconciliation of terms and constructs, 3) back-translation, 4) team review and further cultural adaptation, 5) pre-testing and revision, 6) qualitative evaluations, 7) team review and consensus forming, and 8) final assessment adapted to target language.
Respondents were asked to give score for the frequency of online counseling services received by their children based on their observation at home starting from 1 (never) until 5 (very often). The example of item to assess and identify parents' understanding is "I think online counseling services are important for my children future." Of 14 items, there found only 3 items invalid, so all items were used in this study. The items gained the level of reliability and validity of (r = 0.460 -0.830), and Cronbach's alpha of 0.817. In addition, to analyze the data, the researchers used descriptive statistical analysis aiming at determining the role of parents in the implementation of supporting technology in the counseling services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tool was linear regression analysis with the help of SPSS version 24.

Descriptive Analysis
Initially, the researchers performed an analysis using IBM SPSS version 24 on the data of 350 students' parents. The data can be seen in The results of parental perception of e-learning instrument showed that parents who had a high level of understanding category were as many as 90 people or 25%, fair category of 189 people or 54%, and low category of 71 people or 20.3%. In other words, most of parents had fair category. Besides, it can be known that parents who had high level of support were as many as 88 people or 25%, fair level as many as 196 people or 5.0%, and low level as many as 66 people or 18.9%. Thus, the majority of parents had fair level category of support. In table 3, the effect of understanding and support gained positive and significant results (β = 0.55; t = 21.75; p < 0.05). It indicated that if parents have a high level of understanding in online counseling services, the level of parental support will be higher.

Discussion
The COVID-19 pandemic affected educational policies. One of policy applied during this pandemic is the implementation of distant learning (Bestiantono et al., 2020).
Various media are used to support the learning process, for example, Google Classroom, Zoom, educational TV, ruang guru and other online learning applications (Nilam et al., 2020). Counselors as counseling service professionals need to do adapttation to face significant challenges in the implementation of online counseling (König et al., 2020).
Online counseling services implementation can run well with the support of parents. This kind of counseling urges to be done since the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all elements of life, especially economy, health, and education (Bostan et al., 2020) although parents may find it difficult in providing learning facilities for their children (Kong, 2018). Issues like this motivated the researchers to identify the extent to which parental understanding about online counseling contributes to the provision of support for online counseling services.
With regard to the findings, there was a positive effect of parents' understanding on the support for online counseling services. This is supported by the findings of Kong's study (2018) that parents who have good understanding about online counseling services will provide support and facilities. Accordingly, counselors' ability to give positive information to parents will positively influence their understanding and support (Tsuei & Hsu, 2019). It proves that collaborative competence becomes the main factor in implementing online counseling services. Further, by having counselors socialize the benefits of online counseling services in children's learning, it is expected that the level of parental support will get higher and in turn provide facilities for the implementation of online counseling.
The fair level of parents' understanding found in this study influenced their support for online counseling services. It is in accordance with a study by (Mutambara & Bayaga, 2020) that when parents have positive feelings towards online counseling services, these feelings will strengthen their intention to allow their children to carry out online counseling services for self-development. Hwang & Hariyanti (2020) found that parents believe that the use of mobile devices is beneficial for learning, but they are worried about excessive use at the same time. This means that even though parents have knowledge about the benefits of online counseling services for self-development, concerns about increasing internet quota cost affect their attitudes towards online counseling services.

Limitations
There are several limitations to the findings of this study that can be concern for future studies. First, the samples of this study did not represent national scale level because it was only taken from parents whose children studied at Junior High School and Senior or Vocational High School around Semarang Regency. It also implies that this study did not specify the analysis on a particular educational level. Second, the researchers got difficulties in collecting respondents' data in which its process took 2 months to complete. Sometimes, the information given was seemingly accurate and represented the real conditions due to different thoughts and understanding of each respondent. Another factor, namely the online medium used to collect the data also became a shortcoming because this study could not cover all levels of society so that the collected data were as many as 350 respondents. This number was far from the target that has been determined previously in this study.

Conclusions and Recommendations
This study was designed to determine the role of parents in the implementation of guidance and counseling services technology during the COVID-19 pandemic in Semarang Regency. Generally, the findings derived from linear regression analysis indicate that students' parents have good understanding of the online counseling services, so their support becomes increasingly great too.
It is suggested that guidance and counseling teachers should improve the quality of online counseling services during this COVID-19 pandemic and collaborate with students' parents to achieve the common goals of the online counseling implementation.
Then, the teachers are also recommended to search for or identify weaknesses in the online counseling services for better implementation in the future. Additionally, the future studies are expected to refer to the findings of this study in conducting investigations and development of renewable and user-friendly online counseling services media for students and parents as well as examining the effectiveness of online counseling services given to students during the COVID-19 pandemic.