Proximal family processes
transitions to school and subsequent educational success. Wigfield & Asher (1984)
suggest that factors in the home outweigh factors in the school in predicting children’s
desire and ability to succeed in school.
To reflect the broad domains of the many educational type behaviours discussed in
the literature and their effects on children’s development we break this section down
into two sub-sections:
i. Reading to children and exposure to print;
ii. Cognitive environments and teaching strategies.
These parent-child interactions are clearly related and there are important overlaps
between them. However, it is useful to break them down in this way to better
understand their specific influences on the various domains of children’s
development. The influence of parent’s education is similar across these related areas
and therefore is not broken down in the same way, but discussed for educational
behaviours in general.
Reading to children and exposure to print
Just as oral language development has a history that precedes the child’s utterance of
his or her first word, reading development also has a history that precedes the child’s
ability to read. Parents play an important role in fostering literacy skills in their
children. Reading to children and involving them in other activities related to literacy
facilitates the development of an orientation toward print, knowledge of narrative
structure and function, general knowledge of the world, phonological awareness and a
positive attitude toward reading (Baker et al., 1994).
The EPPE (Effective Provision of Pre-school Education) project is the first major
European longitudinal study of a national sample of young children’s development
(intellectual and social/behavioural) between the ages of three and seven years. To
investigate the effects of pre-school education for three and four year olds, the EPPE
team collected a wide range of information on over 3,000 children, their parents, their
home environments and the pre-school settings they attended1. A sample of ‘home’
children, who had no or minimal pre-school experiences was recruited for the study at
entry to school for comparison.
EPPE findings document that the frequency with which parents read to their children
is associated with higher scores in language, pre-reading, early number concepts and
non-verbal reasoning at primary school entry. These results hold when the estimation
controls for parents’ education and SES, child’s gender and age and the number of
siblings. However, whether parents read to their children or not is likely to depend in
part on whether their children wish to be read to or not so the measure must be treated
as endogenous. The EPPE effect size is likely to an overestimate of the causal effect
of parents’ reading.
1 Settings (141) were drawn from a range of providers: local authority day nursery, integrated centres,
playgroups, private day nurseries, maintained nursery school and maintained nursery classes.
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