Parenting & School Readiness Among Low-Income children

Northern Illinois University, Dekalb IL

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): School readiness has been a recent focus within the research and policy worlds. Children who are prepared to learn during their first year of school are placed on a positive developmental trajectory where the expected outcome is eventual high school graduation and success as an adult. However, research shows that children from low-income families often are not prepared to enter kindergarten, lagging behind their more affluent peers in terms of pre-reading skills, numeracy skills, and emotional adjustment. Parents are considered to be their children's first teachers, yet parenting is multidimensional and which specific parenting practices support the development of children's school readiness are not yet fully understood, especially among low-income and ethnically diverse populations. The proposed research seeks to examine how two aspects of parenting, warmth and cognitive stimulation, may foster the development of specific facets of school-readiness: early academic skills, socioemotional functioning, and self regulation. Data will be drawn from the Main Survey and Embedded Developmental Study (EDS) of Wave 1 and 2 of Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, a longitudinal study sampling low-income, minority children and youth from low-income, urban neighborhoods. As part of the EDS, mothers and their two- to four-year old children were videotaped playing with toy blocks in their homes (N=518). Parenting practices related to warmth and cognitive stimulation will be systematically coded from this videotaped data. Regression analyses will examine how both the observed and self-reported measures of parenting, independently and in combination, predict child outcomes over time. These analyses will go beyond existing research by using multiple methods (observational and self-reports) longitudinally. Furthermore, a second set of analyses will consider whether the measurement used is culturally equivalent between African Americans and Hispanic Americans, which collectively make up 94% of the total sample. If measures are considered equivalent, additional analyses will be run exploring whether the parenting practices considered work similarly across groups.