Poster #72 - Individual Differences in Parental Support for Math and Literacy in Early Childhood

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

Previous research has shown that activities in the home environments of young children can help bolster children’s academic skills (Taylor, Clayton, & Rowley, 2004). Specifically, the home literacy environment (HLE), which includes activities such as reading or identifying letters, and the home numeracy environment (HNE), which includes activities such as counting objects or playing board games, predict young children’s reading and math skills, respectively (Bus, van IJzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; Elliott & Bachman, 2018; Evans & Shaw, 2008). Some work has identified subdimensions of the HLE and HNE that predict distinct aspects of children’s skills, such as formal and informal practices within each domain (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Skwarchuk, Sowinski, & LeFevre, 2014). However, we know relatively little about the parental characteristics that predict the HLE and HNE. In this study, we identify underlying subdimensions of the HLE and HNE and examine how resources such as income and educational attainment (Bradley, Corwyn, Mcadoo, & Coll, 2001; Saxe, Guberman, & Gearhart, 1987) and beliefs and attitudes (Musun-Miller & Blevins-Knabe, 1998; Sy & Schulenberg, 2005) predict these factors.
Participants in this study included 232 parents (91 fathers) of two- to six-year-old children recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Through an online survey, parents indicated how often they engaged in seven reading activities and nine math activities. Parents also were asked to rate the importance of five early literacy skills and seven early math skills and indicated the relative influence of the home and school contexts for the development of children’s literacy, communication, and math skills. Finally, parents reported their income and educational attainment as well as their race/ethnicity, gender, and marital status and their child’s age and gender, which were included as covariates in the present analyses.
Three HLE factors emerged: literacy practices (i.e., teaching names and sounds associated with letters), indirect practices (i.e., reading and teaching new words), and written practices (i.e., having the child read, writing or printing letters). Two HNE factors emerged: indirect practices (i.e., doing simple sums, talking about money, talking about time, measuring objects, and playing counting games) and written practices (i.e., connect the dot activities, number storybooks or activity books, and card games). For each of the five factors, parenting practices were regressed on income, education, and covariates, followed by beliefs about each subject.
We found that income but not education positively predicted literacy and written HLE practices, although the former only reached trend level (Table 1). Beliefs about language predicted distinct aspects of the HLE, such that parents who believed literacy skills were more important engaged in more literacy practices whereas parents who felt more responsible for teaching these skills engaged in more written practices. In contrast, educational attainment but not income was negatively related to written HNE (Table 2). While neither education nor income predicted indirect HNE, parents with stronger beliefs about math tended to engage in indirect HNE more frequently.
These analyses identify unique associations between parental characteristics and their provision of home learning opportunities that offer interesting implications for future intervention work.

Authors

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Peter Zheng, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Melissa Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author