My child lags behind: Parents’ perceptions of children's needs for language support, their home-literacy practices, and children's language skills

Abstract

The home literacy environment (HLE) in terms of providing frequent and high-quality access to oral and written language is a well-established, positive predictor of children's language and emergent literacy development. However, little is known about parents’ perception of children's needs for language support and how this perception in terms of a compensatory motive for fostering children's language skills relates to parents’ home-literacy practices, and their children's language skills. To examine these questions, we conducted a study with 193 preschool children and their parents. We assessed parents’ motive to foster their children to compensate for a perceived unfavorable language development, multiple indicators of the HLE, and children's language skills. Parents’ compensatory motive proved to reflect the needs of their children as children of parents reporting a compensatory motive displayed lower language skills than children of parents who indicated no such motive. However, parents with and without compensatory motive did not differ in terms of reported home-literacy practices. There were also differences concerning the correlational pattern between home-literacy practices and children's language development, with correlations being generally weaker and sometimes even negative in the compensatory group. The results suggest that the relationship between home-literacy practices and children's language development might be decidedly complex and less straightforward than often assumed.