Maternal and Paternal Reading Involvement and Children’s Language Development

Time: 
06.11.2018 - 17:15 to 18:45
Location : 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event : 
AB A-Kolloquium
Lecturer: 
Prof. Pia Schober, Ph.D.
Lecturer affiliation: 
Universität Tübingen
Description: 

This study investigated how the frequency with which both parents read to their children differs across family types and how it related to changes in language development of children in the UK across the transition to primary school. We explore how parental reading differs by cognitive and emotional resources of mothers and fathers and test whether the higher-resourced parent compensates for the partner in families in which resources vary between partners. Child well-being has frequently been suggested to benefit when fathers are very involved with their children. To date, few studies have empirically tested this hypothesis using longitudinal data and have taken educational stimulation of mothers and fathers into account. This study is one of the first to examine if the source of educational stimulation (mothers or fathers) matters for a child’s development or if the overall amount is more important.

Using three waves from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (N = 5,873 families), ordinal logistic regressions of reading frequency and OLS regressions with lagged dependent variables of children’s language development were analyzed. The latter was measured with the BAS Naming Vocabulary Test. Our results indicate that mothers read on average more frequently to children than fathers and the frequency of reading is positively associated with education levels and negatively associated with depressive symptoms. We do not find evidence of compensation in frequency of reading among partners with differing cognitive or emotional resources within families. Fathers’ reading frequency was more positively associated with children’s progress in Naming Vocabulary than mothers’ across family types. Fathers contributed more to the variation in a family’s total amount of reading, which was equally predictive of children’s language development. The significant and relatively homogeneous effect of fathers’ reading frequency across family types in combination with the significant educational gradient in reading to children suggests that current reading practices in families contribute to increasing social inequalities in children’s early literacy.