Development
How does parenting relate to preschoolers' early reading and maths?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children whose parents gave well-tuned, less negative help during play had better self-control skills a year later, and those skills in turn went with better early reading and maths.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Two-wave longitudinal study about 13 months apart: observed parent-child puzzle play and child EF at Time 1, EF, reasoning and academic tests at Time 2, analysed with structural equation mediation models
- N
- N=117 · 117 parent-child dyads included via full information estimation; 103 returned for the Time 2 visit
- Population
- 3- to 4-year-old English-speaking children and a parent, recruited in the East of England; mostly highly educated parents
- Outcome
- Early academic ability (WIAT-II-UK word reading and mathematics reasoning composite) at about age 5
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Key findings
The three parenting measures were largely unrelated to each other, and each had only weak links with academic ability. Scaffolding and negative interaction each uniquely explained about 5% and 4% of the variance in later EF, and EF at Time 2 significantly mediated their links with academic ability, with no remaining direct paths. General reasoning ability did not act as a mediator. The home learning environment, in contrast, was directly related to academic ability and not via EF.
Methodology
The researchers followed 117 families with a 3- or 4-year-old across two lab visits roughly a year apart. At the first visit, parents and children did jigsaw puzzles together for 5 minutes, and coders rated how contingently the parent adjusted help (scaffolding) and how critical or conflictual the interaction was; children also did executive-function tasks such as Happy/Sad, card sorting and self-ordered pointing. At the second visit, children repeated EF tasks and took reasoning and early reading and maths tests, and parents reported home learning activities. Mediation models tested whether EF carried the link between parenting and academic ability, controlling for earlier verbal and general cognitive ability, parental education, age and schooling.
Limitations
The design is observational with only two waves, parenting was observed once at Time 1 and home learning reported once at Time 2, and academic ability was measured only once, so the direction of effects cannot be tested and the mediation is not proof of causation. Parents and children share genes, so the links could partly reflect genetic influences rather than parenting itself, as the authors note. The sample was small and socioeconomically homogeneous (most parents had degrees), parenting was sampled from a single 5-minute puzzle task, and dropout was slightly higher in less-educated families.
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