Family-Teacher Relationships and Program Family Engagement: Associations with Preschoolers’ Social and Behavioral Outcomes

• In Event: 2-211 - It Takes a Village: Exploring the Antecedents, Outcomes and Patterns of Family Engagement in ECE

Integrative Statement

Improving process quality in early childhood education (ECE) settings, that is, strengthening teacher-child interactions as a way to advance children’s well-being, learning, and developmental outcomes has considerable support in research findings (Vandell et al., 2010). The body of research examining the role of teacher-parent relationships and program-level engagement strategies (i.e., family communication and involvement opportunites) ) in furthering children’s social emotional and behavior outcomes is less well developed, even though bridging ECE classrooms and families to advance children’s school readiness skills is widely encouraged, particularly in programs serving low income children and families. Therefore, in this study, we examined associations between teacher-parent relationships, program-level family engagement strategies and specific social emotional/behavioral outcomes in preschool-aged children using both teacher-reported and direct observation of children’s skills.

This study includes a sample of 329 parents/children and their 52 lead teachers in general classrooms from 13 ECE center-based programs (six Head Start). Parents responded to questions about child/family demographics. Lead teachers reported their perceptions of relationships with children’s families using the Scales Measuring Aspects of Child care Quality (6 items, α = .85, Emlen et al., 2000). Directors reported their program-level efforts to build positive relationships between teachers and families using 10 items (a sum of family engagement activities, e.g., “We hold regular parent-teacher conferences” and “We periodically send out newsletters to parents.”). For outcomes, teachers completed a questionnaire on each child’s social –emotional functioning using three subscales from the Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation (SCBE-30; LaFreniere & Dumas, 1996): social competence (10 items, α = .89), anger/aggression (10 items, α = .93), and anxiety/withdrawal (10 items, α = .87). We also directly observed children’s behavioral self-regulation using the Head-to-Toes task (Ponitz et al., 2008). Table 1 shows participants characteristics and descriptive statistics.

Accounting for the nested data structure (children nested within classrooms nested within centers), we conducted three-level multilevel analyses. We controlled for children’s age, gender, race/ethnicity and disability status, parents’ educational attainment and income, teachers’ educational attainment and experience years, and program type whether they are Head Start. As shown in Table 2, teachers’ positive relationship with families was significantly associated with children’s greater social competence and lower anxiety/withdrawal. Higher program-level family engagement efforts were significantly associated with lower anger-aggression and higher behavioral self-regulation.

These results demonstrate that both teacher’s relationships with families and program level family engagement efforts are associated with children’s overall social emotional development, but that teacher-parent and program-parent relationships correspond with different aspects of social emotional development, suggesting that efforts to foster positive relationships with families should address and coordinate both classroom and program approaches. Future research should explore the mechanisms that explain the associations with different these different domains.

Authors

• Cynthia K Buettner, Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Naomi Lang, Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author