Parental contributors to children’s persistence and school readiness

Abstract

This study examined whether parental teaching strategies (e.g., scaffolding) are predictive of school readiness competencies through children’s task persistence, and if the strength of the relation varies across two contextual features of parenting (e.g., warmth and harsh discipline). Past research has examined contextual features of parenting or specific parenting practices as being related to children’s achievement, with less attention given to how they might interact. In the present study, a moderated-mediation model was tested to assess whether parental scaffolding skills predict children’s language-cognitive and social–emotional school readiness, mediated by children’s persistence and moderated by parent warmth and harsh discipline. Exploratory analyses assessed whether a competing sequential-mediation model better explained the associations among parenting, children’s persistence, and school readiness than a moderated-mediation model. In a low-income sample of families from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (N = 2977), parental scaffolding significantly predicted children’s persistence at 36 months, as well as both latent constructs of school readiness before kindergarten. Persistence partially mediated the link between parental scaffolding and both latent constructs of school readiness. Neither warmth nor harsh discipline moderated the mediational model. In the sequential-mediation model, parent scaffolding and children’s persistence mediated the associations between warmth and harsh discipline and both latent constructs of school readiness. The sequential-mediation model provided a similar fit to the data as the moderated-mediation model. The results indicate that parental scaffolding can promote children’s persistence and later school readiness.