Exploring Family Literacy Practices and Child Language and Literacy Outcomes Among Chilean Families

• In Event: Parent practices and socio-emotional, cognitive, and linguistic outcomes in young Chilean children

Abstract

Introduction. Parent practices are not universal; there is high variability in which parents implement their practices, likely influencing children’s developmental trajectories. Knowing the unique effect that a change in parent activities has on child development helps to explore cultural variability in practice implementation. This study seeks to examine how practices of Chilean parents change by child’s age and how changes in parent practices impact language and cognitive outcomes in children between 0 and 7 years of age.

Study population. Data was taken from the Chilean Longitudinal Study results for Early Childhood (ELPI), a child-centered nationally representative survey. The ELPI has three data waves, collected in the years 2010 (n=14,070), 2012 (n=14,279), and 2017 (n=5,015). The sample comprises children between 0 and 7 years of age; 50.45% are male.

Methods. Parental activities (book reading, storytelling, conversational, and recreational activities) were used as explanatory variables. These practices were included simultaneously in the regression to estimate the effect of each practice while reducing the risk of omitted variable bias.
The response variables were the child language (measured using the PPVT) and cognitive (measured using the BDI) outcomes. For the analytical strategy, random effects at the child level and fixed effects at the time level were used to control for (1) non-observable characteristics of the child that are constant over time and (2) for every systematic change for the outcome variable to identify the causal impact of parent-child activities in child development. Covariates (i.e., demographic information, child school attendance, parental coresidence, and literacy resources at home) were included sequentially, resulting in five different models.

Results. When accounting for the effect of other practices, only storytelling practices significantly positively affect children’s receptive vocabulary outcomes. The change in practice from not telling stories in the last week to telling stories in the last week generated an estimated increase of 0.037 S.D. (p<0.1) in the child’s mean receptive vocabulary scores. On the other hand, book reading stops being significant after controlling for demographic variables, with statistically significant variables like income, mother employment, and parents’ educational level likely accounting for the child’s language scores.
When using the BDI as the outcome variable, book reading and recreational activities were significant. For storytelling, the significant effect of this practice on cognitive outcomes disappears when literacy resources are included in the regression. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon was observed when using the PPVT as the outcome variable: the estimated coefficient was reduced from 0.067 (p<0.01) to 0.037 s.d. (p<0.1). It is possible that a decrease in sample size caused the reduction in the estimated effect. However, for BDI outcomes, book reading and recreational activities were still significant, which suggests that data reduction is not the problem. Two alternative explanations for this result are that (1) resource availability might be more predictive of the child’s outcome than the storytelling practice, or (2) parents who invest in literacy resources might also support literacy development with activities not assessed in this study.

Author

• Monica Zegers, University of California - San Francisco
  Presenting Author