Patterns of Cognitive and Social-emotional Parental Stimulation Practices Among Ghanaian Kindergarteners

• In Event: Broadening perspectives on parenting and caregiving environments

Abstract

Across geographically diverse samples, engagement in stimulating activities with young children is considered an important element of parenting that promotes young children’s development and serves as an essential investment in children’s socialization and education (Jeong et al., 2017; Yousafzai et al., 2016). Parental stimulation is a multidimensional construct that covers activities ranging from academic, like counting or reading books, to forms of creative self-expression or interpersonal interactions, like singing and storytelling (Bornstein et al., 2015).

Extant research has most often examined a summative score of stimulation activities with the assumption that more stimulation is better and that different types of stimulation are equivalent. In Ghana specifically, relative to peer countries, parental stimulation in both social-emotional and academic activities is low (McCoy et al., 2016). Further, children experience an array of stimulation within their households (Bornstein et al., 2015), with certain types of activities perhaps more likely to co-occur than others. Yet little is known about patterns of parents’ engagement across different activities and their consequences, and an empirical investigation of this has yet to be conducted.

The current study employs latent class analysis to detect unique patterns of parental stimulation practices in Ghana, a lower-middle-income country in West Africa. This approach has the potential to reveal heterogeneous subsets of children, that have previously been undetectable in variable-centered approaches and can add more flavor to a “low-high” spectrum. We then examine child and family sociodemographic predictors of the resultant latent classes. The final aim of this study is to test contemporaneous associations with four school readiness outcomes. The sample of children (N=2,117, M(age)=5.2 years, 49% female) comes from Ghana’s Greater Accra region and was part of a larger longitudinal study.

Parental stimulation in this study was assessed via six commonly used indicators from the UNICEF MICS5 survey (Hamadani et al., 2010), which asked whether parents or other adults in the household had engaged in the six activities with their child in the past 30 days. The four school readiness outcomes were considered and were direct child assessments measured via the Development and Early Learning Assessment, developed by Save the Children (Pisani et al., 2015).

Our results support a 4-class solution that represents (i) Highly Stimulating; (ii) Social-emotionally Stimulating; (iii) Playful; and (iv) Playful and Academically Stimulating households (see Figure 1). Multiple child and family characteristics differentially predicted latent class membership (see Table 1). Interestingly, class membership did not differentially predict children’s literacy, numeracy, executive function, or social-emotional skills, in models with and without control variables.

Our findings indicate that the type, or configuration of types, of stimulation matter less than the quantity and/or quality of parental stimulation in terms of its benefits for early childhood development. Results point to the reality that the vast majority of households are engaging in some forms of stimulation with their young children and shed light on how a range of parent interactions may promote children’s development of school-related skills. A typology approach to parental stimulation can further shed light on improving and developing parenting programs.

Authors

• Noelle Suntheimer, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Emily M Weiss, University of Pennsylvania

• Esinam Ami Avornyo, University of Cape Coast

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania