Why Are Home Literacy Environment and Children's Reading Skills Associated? What Parental Skills Reveal

Elsje Van Bergen,Dorothy Bishop,Titia Van Zuijen,Peter F De Jong

doi:10.1002/rrq.160

Elsje Van Bergen, Dorothy Bishop + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.160

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Abstract

AbstractAssociations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent and child literacy‐related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home literacy and children's reading fluency could be accounted for by parental reading fluency. Although home literacy correlated significantly with children's reading, no variable predicted significant variance after allowing for parental reading, except the number of books in the home. By incorporating measures of heritable parental traits into studies investigating home environment effects, we can start to identify which variables are correlates of parental traits and which might play a causal role in fostering children's development.

Highlights

Children’s word-reading accuracy and fluency is linked to aspects of the family environment that children grow up in, including parents’ educational attainment, how often parents read themselves and to their children, and availability of reading material (Davis-Kean, 2005; Johnson, Martin, Brooks-Gunn, & Petrill, 2008; Kiuru et al, 2013; Leseman & de Jong, 1998; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002)
We focused on decoding skills because (a) they form the basis for reading comprehension skills, and (b) a decoding deficit is the primary criterion for dyslexia, making our study clinically relevant
We showed that children’s basic reading skill is related to several aspects of the home literacy environment, but most seem to be masked genetic effects

Summary

Introduction

Children’s word-reading accuracy and fluency (i.e., decoding) is linked to aspects of the family environment that children grow up in, including parents’ educational attainment, how often parents read themselves and to their children, and availability of reading material (Davis-Kean, 2005; Johnson, Martin, Brooks-Gunn, & Petrill, 2008; Kiuru et al, 2013; Leseman & de Jong, 1998; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002). Panel (b) shows a model explaining the association via a set of genes shared between parents and children, which influences both the number of books and the children’s reading ability This is referred to as a passive gene–environment correlation. If monozygotic twin pairs are more alike in reading skills than dizygotic pairs, this tells us that individual differences among children are partly due to genetic differences This approach cannot be used to study the association between family environment characteristics and child outcomes, because within each twin pair, the children perfectly resemble each other for family characteristics (e.g., they grow up in the same family with the same number of books), independent of zygosity (Turkheimer, D’Onofrio, Maes, & Eaves, 2005). The nature of the effects of family environment on child outcomes cannot be resolved in the classical twin design

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