How Home Gets to School: Early Parenting Predicts African American Children's Classroom Social Emotional Outcomes

Introduction: Past research has shown that positive social emotional development is related to better health, education and psychosocial outcomes. Reciprocally, negative social emotional behaviors (i.e., externalizing/internalizing behaviors) are a related to a number of negative outcomes, including school failure. Our previous studies have found that being a male, living in a single parent home and living in low-wealth communities are all significantly related to early behavioral problems, special education assignments, and suspensions. Using a family-centered ecological framework, we examine the extent to which family (e.g., maternal warmth and home literacy involvement) and sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., family income) contribute to African American children’s social emotional development in kindergarten.

Methods: Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (N=2467) were used to examine the extent to which maternal warmth and home learning stimulation predicted African American children’s kindergarten social emotional development. Teachers provided ratings of children’s positive social emotional development (i.e., approaches to learning, self-control, interpersonal skills) as well as their negative social emotional development (i.e., externalizing and internalizing). Maternal warmth and home literacy involvement were measured using mother-reports of their home-based parenting practices.

Results: Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that maternal home learning stimulation but not warmth was a significant predictor of positive social emotional development. Specifically, mothers who reported engaging in more frequent home learning stimulation (e.g., shared book reading and visiting the library) had children with more positive teacher-ratings of approaches to learning, self-control, interpersonal skills and fewer externalizing behaviors. Further, African American girls from two-parent homes, with highly educated, affluent mothers had the most positive ratings of social emotional development across all dimensions, suggesting that gender and socioeconomic status also play key roles in shaping the social emotional development of African American children.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that family-level prevention efforts that target home literacy involvement as a strategy for preventing problem behaviors may be especially beneficial for African American families with young children. It is likely that structured activities such as shared book reading in the home prepare children for the structure of kindergarten environments