Parent discipline and pre-schoolers’ social skills

ABSTRACT

Educators recognize children’s social competence as an indicator of school readiness. Children’s social competence may be promoted prior to kindergarten through parents’ discipline. We assessed parent discipline as a predictor of 37 low-income pre-schoolers’ social skills over four months. Parents answered open-ended questions about how they would respond to child behaviours; children’s preschool teachers rated their social skills. In a hierarchical regression controlling for children’s age and initial social skills, parents’ inductions significantly predicted children’s later social skills. Although children’s social skills were correlated with parents’ pairing of consequences and inductions, this relation was no longer significant when controlling for age and initial social skills. Power assertive discipline and time-outs were not significantly correlated with children’s social skills. The results suggest that parents’ inductions may be beneficial for children’s social skills by focusing the child’s attention on the reasons the behaviour was inappropriate.

KEYWORDS:

• Parent discipline
• social skills
• pre-schoolers

Acknowledgements

The work was supported by a grant from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) [#R03HD069514] to Virginia Tompkins (PI). I am extremely grateful to the Head Start teachers, parents, and children who participated in this study, and to the staff who made this possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by a grant from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) [#R03HD069514] to Virginia Tompkins (PI).

Notes on contributors

Virginia Tompkins

Virginia Tompkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Ohio State University-Lima campus. Her research interests include young children's social and cognitive development and the family factors that are related to or advance these developments.

Eve Villaruel

Eve Villaruel was an undergraduate at the Ohio State University-Lima majoring in Psychology at the time of this study.