Parents' and Day-Care Teachers' Perceptions of Young Children's Skills

Abstract

This study investigated how accurately parents and day-care teachers perceive young children's fine motor, gross motor, and language skills. Subjects were 30 preschool-age children, 30 mothers or primary caregivers, 16 fathers, and 30 day-care center teachers. Children's skills were measured by their performance on 21 items near their age levels on the Denver Developmental Screening Test. Parents' and teachers' perceptions, measured by their judgments as to whether they thought the child was capable of performing the 21 skills, were scored as underestimates, hits, or overestimates. Paired t tests comparing mothers', fathers', and teachers' responses yielded no differences between groups except mothers overestimated children's gross motor skills and teachers underestimated children's fine motor skills more than fathers. Correlations confirmed the lack of differences.