Promoting Kindergartener’s Social-Emotional Skills: The Role of Parental Engagement in Children’s Preschool Education

Rationale: Many young children spend time in Early Care and Education (ECE) settings, which can promote healthy development and readiness for school. Most research has focused on the importance of ECE quality for school readiness outcomes (e.g., Broekhuizen et al., 2016), but much less is known about the relative importance of parent engagement practices used by ECE settings for promoting stimulating home environments and school readiness. This study leverages a national, longitudinal study of early childhood to explore the links between ECE engagement practices, parent engagement in ECE, home environments, and children’s social-emotional school readiness in kindergarten.

Method: We drew a subsample from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) comprising children attending center-based ECE during the pre-school assessment (N = 2,506). Research questions were tested with structural equation models in Mplus 7.3, which included two latent factors: (1) ECE Strategies to engage parents: three parent reported and one teacher-reported item. (2) Parent-Child home learning activities: parent-reports of 3 activities (e.g., singing songs) and observations of mothers’ stimulation of cognitive development during a semi-structured task. Parent-ECE Engagement was a summed score of parent reports of 5-items (e.g., attend meeting, class event). To reduce computational burden, factor scores of externalizing problems, social competence, and approaches to learning were estimated from 16 teacher-reported items of social-emotional skills (Najaran et al., 2010). 

Results: Covariates included demographics, 24-month parent-child learning activities, and pre-school teacher-reported social-emotional skills. Indirect effects with bootstrapping were estimated (Preacher & Hayes, 2008). Several direct and indirect effects emerged. Parent-child home learning activities were consistently directly associated with social-emotional outcomes. ECE strategies to engage parents were indirectly associated with improved social competence via increases in parent-child home learning activities skills (β= .02, SE = .01, 95% CI=.014 -.016). Moreover, parent engagement in ECE was indirectly associated with improved approaches to learning via increases in parent-child home learning activities (β= .02, SE= .02, 95% CI=.017-.023). 

Conclusions: These results highlight the relevance of engaging parents in center-based ECE as a social-emotional skills-promoting intervention via positive changes to stimulating home environments. We will situate these findings in a discussion of the rapid expansion of ECE, the ongoing conversations and lingering questions about what constitutes high-quality ECE, and, specifically, the role of parental engagement in preventing poorer readiness for school.