Reading
Do parents' learning difficulties and home activities shape skills?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Parents' own reading and maths difficulties predicted their children's school skills directly, not by changing how much parents read with or taught their children at home.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Prospective cohort (First Steps Study) with parent questionnaires in kindergarten and child skill tests in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 9, analysed with longitudinal structural path models.
- N
- N=2525 · 2,525 children followed in the First Steps Study; the paper does not report a separate analytic N for each path model.
- Population
- Finnish children born in 2000 from four urban, rural and semi-rural municipalities, and their mothers and fathers.
- Outcome
- Children's reading fluency, reading comprehension and arithmetic fluency across Grades 1-9, predicted by parent-reported reading/maths difficulties (familial risk), parental education, home teaching and shared reading.
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
Parental maths difficulties predicted poorer arithmetic fluency and, across domains, poorer reading comprehension, while fathers' (but not mothers') reading difficulties predicted poorer reading fluency; each effect explained only about 1-2% of variance. Parents with difficulties did not differ in how much they taught or read at home, so there were no indirect effects via the home environment. Shared reading predicted reading comprehension (about 1-2% of variance), whereas formal teaching of letters and numbers predicted none of the skills. More educated mothers did more shared reading and less formal teaching, and all skills were highly stable, with 72-87% of later variance explained by earlier scores.
Methodology
The researchers followed 2,525 Finnish children from kindergarten to Grade 9. In kindergarten, mothers and fathers reported whether they or their partner had reading or maths difficulties, their education, how often they read books with the child, and how often they taught letters, reading, numbers and arithmetic. Children took group tests of reading fluency, reading comprehension and arithmetic fluency in Grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 9, and path models tested direct effects and indirect effects running through the home environment.
Limitations
The design is correlational, so the authors stress that even solid longitudinal links cannot be read causally; randomised home-learning interventions would be needed. Familial risk was a short parent self-report rather than tested parental skills, and home activities were self-reported and open to social-desirability bias, with only a single item for shared reading and none for informal numeracy. Quality of home teaching was not measured, and results come from Finland's transparent orthography and strong school support, so the null effect of home teaching may not hold in English-speaking or less equal systems. Genetic and environmental transmission cannot be separated with this design.
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