Mothers' & Fathers' Contributions to Infant Language Development: Evidence from Small-Scale Studies and Secondary Data

• In Event: 2-010 - Utilizing Multiple Data Sets

Abstract

Mothers and fathers promote their children’s language skills through literacy activities. Both the quantity and quality of parents’ literacy activities have been shown to relate to toddler’s language development (Rowe, Leech, & Cabrera, 2017), but less is known about how these mechanisms operate in infancy. Small-scale studies provide a rich, observational data, but lack the power and sample needed to generalize findings to the population. In contrast, findings from large-scale nationally representative datasets are generalizable but focus more on the quantity than on the quality of parenting behaviors.

We address this challenge by using both types of data to examine home literacy environment of infants. Specifically, we ask (1) Are there associations between the frequency of maternal and paternal literacy activities (e.g. reading, storytelling, singing songs) and children’s language development (e.g. receptive and expressive language, overall mental ability) at 9 months? (2) Is the association between maternal and paternal reading and children’s language skills moderated by the quality of maternal and paternal reading? We use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a nationally representative sample of children in two-parent families born in 2001 (N = 5450), and from Baby Books 2 (BB2: Cabrera & Reich, 2017), a small-scale study of children in low-income, two-parent families (anticipated N = 100) that will include observational data of the quality of mother and father reading.

Preliminary analyses using the ECLS-B show that the frequency of literacy activities (e.g. reading, storytelling) of both mothers and fathers are uniquely associated with children’s overall mental ability at 9 months, controlling for SES (β = .088 and .038, respectively, p < .01). However, only mothers’ literacy activities were uniquely associated with children’s expressive and receptive language skills (β = .058 and .046, respectively, p < .001). Data collection for BB2 is ongoing and includes the frequency of parents’ literacy behaviors and children’s expressive and receptive language development at 9 months. Mother-child and father-child reading interactions will be coded for the quality of reading (e.g. wh-questions, recasting, labeling). Future analyses will examine how the quality of parents’ reading influences their children’s language skills.

These findings suggest that both mothers and fathers are important to infants’ language development, though their contributions may operate in different ways. These results have implications for whether programs should consider the quantity and quality of inputs from both mothers and fathers on infant development.

Authors

• Kelsey Garcia, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Natasha Cabrera, University of Maryland

• Estefany Araniva, University of Maryland

• Jerry West, University of Maryland