Fathers' and mothers' perceptions of their preschool children's emergent literacy

Abstract

This study examined parent's perceptions of their preschool children's emergent literacy. Of particular interest was the relationship of several children's characteristics (age, gender, and achievement) to the predictions of fathers and mothers. Fathers and mothers of 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls were asked to predict their children's performances on six measures of emergent literacy: letter naming, auditory discrimination, context-dependent word recognition, storybook orientation, writing, and interest. In comparing these predictions with children's actual performances, both fathers and mothers were found to significantly overestimate their children's performances on over half of the measures. Parents made appropriate differentiations for the age of the child. Furthermore, the accuracy of predictions did not differ significantly between parents of boys and girls. On most measures, a higher degree of association was found between the predictions of mother and father than between either parent's prediction and child's performance.