Poster #97 - Mothers' Social Support and Child Academic Achievement: Mediation via Parenting, Teacher-Child Conflict, and School Attitudes

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Family Context & Processes

Integrative Statement

Social support encompasses one’s access to emotional/informational support, tangible support, positive interactions, and affection (Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991). Although social support is positively related to individual adjustment (Feeney & Collins, 2015), fewer studies have examined relations between caregivers’ social support and children’s academic outcomes. Some studies suggest that maternal social support is positively related to social competence in Mexican-origin children (Taylor et al., 2015) and school readiness in low-income African-American children (Bono et al., 2015), yet pathways accounting for these effects are uncertain. The current study adds to this growing literature by evaluating prospective relations between mothers’ perceived social support and later child academic achievement as explained by theoretically-specified mediators in a large community sample.

Data were collected from 250 mother-child dyads (50.0% male, 46.0% Latinx) in an ongoing longitudinal study. At wave 1 (Mage = 49.05 months, SD = 2.92), mothers completed the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS) measure of social support (Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991) and an observational assessment of parenting across a series of difficult teaching tasks with the child from which independent observers rated the mothers’ hostility on a 7 point scale (ICC = .80). One year later, teachers reported on the degree of conflict they experienced with the child in the classroom using the Student Teacher Rating Scale (Pianta, 1992). At age 6, children reported on their Feelings About School (Valeski & Stipek, 2001) during a laboratory assessment, and they completed the Letter-Word Subtest of the Woodcock Johnson Tests of Achievement at age 7 (Woodcock et al., 2007). Statistical controls included child IQ (Wechlser, 2002) and family SES (Hollingshead, 1975), which were assessed at wave 1. Missing data were imputed using the Expectation-Maximization Algorithm in SPSS 24 to yield a full data set, though the raw and estimated findings were consistent.

Table 1 displays correlations among the study variables, and Figure 1 shows a serial mediation analysis from mothers’ social support at age 4 to children’s reading achievement at age 7 using Haye’s (2013) PROCESS routine. Maternal social support was associated with less maternal hostility at wave 1. Maternal hostility predicted elevated rates of teacher-reported teacher-child conflict one year later. Teacher-child conflict at age 5 predicted children’s negative feelings about school at age 6, which in turn predicted lower academic achievement at age 7.

These findings highlight the salience of maternal social support for promoting positive child development while elucidating a developmental cascade whereby parental social support may influence parenting and, by extension, children’s social relationships in the school setting and beyond. Moreover, the data suggest that mothers’ relational vulnerabilities may be carried into the teacher-child relationship with negative implications for children’s perceptions of school and, by extension, child academic achievement.

Authors

• Emily Moorhouse, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Tuppett M Yates, University of California, Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author