Abstract
The past decade has witnessed a growth of interest in parental influences on individual differences in children's executive function (EF) on the one hand and in the academic consequences of variation in children's EF on the other hand. The primary aim of this longitudinal study was to examine whether children's EF mediated the relation between three distinct aspects of parental behavior (i.e., parental scaffolding, negative parent-child interactions, and the provision of informal learning opportunities) and children's academic ability (as measured by standard tests of literacy and numeracy skills). Data were collected from 117 parent-child dyads (60 boys) at two time points ~1 year apart (M Age at Time 1 = 3.94 years, SD = 0.53; M Age at Time 2 = 5.11 years, SD = 0.54). At both time points children completed a battery of tasks designed to measure general cognitive ability (e.g., non-verbal reasoning) and EF (e.g., inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory). Our models revealed that children's EF (but not general cognitive ability) mediated the relations between parental scaffolding and negative parent-child interactions and children's early academic ability. In contrast, parental provision of opportunities for learning in the home environment was directly related to children's academic abilities. These results suggest that parental scaffolding and negative parent-child interactions influence children's academic ability by shaping children's emerging EF.
Highlights
Meta-analytic evidence from longitudinal research demonstrates that early academic abilities, such as a rudimentary understanding of mathematics and basic literacy, provide an important foundation for later academic achievement (e.g., Duncan et al, 2007)
We evaluated the fit of our models using Brown’s (2015) four criteria: A non-significant χ2 test of model fit, comparative fit index (CFI) ≥ 0.95, Tucker Lewis index (TLI) ≥ 0.95, and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) ≤ 0.08
Our results showed that these three dimensions of parental behavior were unrelated, but each dimension exhibited weak associations with individual differences in children’s academic ability
Summary
Meta-analytic evidence from longitudinal research demonstrates that early academic abilities, such as a rudimentary understanding of mathematics and basic literacy, provide an important foundation for later academic achievement (e.g., Duncan et al, 2007). Recent decades have seen a growth of interest in how children’s early academic abilities relate to parental behaviors, on the one hand, and children’s emerging executive functions (EF–the suite of cognitive processes involved in the control of thoughts and actions) (Blair and Raver, 2015) on the other hand. Integrating these twin strands of research, the present study sought to examine whether variation in children’s EF might play a mediating role in the association between preschool parent-child interactions and early academic ability. Longitudinal evidence shows that children’s HLE in the preschool years is positively correlated with mathematics ability in early and middle childhood (Melhuish et al, 2008)
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