Parental Engagement in Early Childhood Education at Home

Abstract

This study uses data from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy to identify relationships between parents’ demographic/socioeconomic backgrounds and their self-reported frequencies of engaging in early childhood education activities. It also examines race/ethnicity-related disparities in the frequency of reading to children and using interactive reading techniques after controlling for household income, nativity, and parents’ prose literacy skills. Regression analyses show that White parents are more likely than Black and Hispanic parents to report reading to their children frequently, while Black parents are more likely than White parents to report teaching the alphabet and pointing out words to children.

Acknowledgments

This paper is intended to promote the exchange of ideas among researchers and policy makers. The views expressed in it are part of ongoing research and analysis and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Department of Education and other affiliated institutions.

Notes

1. The NAAL public use data can be found at http://www.nces.ed.gov/naal/datafiles.asp#2.

2. Using the NAAL data, Kutner et al. (2007) revealed positive relationships between parents’ English literacy level and their engagement in reading to their children and three types of interactive reading activities with their children. Therefore, the first research question in this study does not investigate the bivariate relationship between parents’ literacy level and their engagement in early child education activities at home.

3. According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the world's largest organization working on behalf of young children, the developmental definition of early childhood education spans the human life from birth to age 8 (NAEYC, 2009). In the NAAL background questionnaire, only parents with children under 8 years of age were asked about the four literacy-related activities examined in this paper.

4. Note that prison inmates are not part of the present study because they were not asked about family literacy practices. Adults who could not be interviewed because of language barriers or mental disability are excluded from analyses in the present study because neither background nor literacy data could be collected from them.

5. AM is a statistical software package for analyzing data, especially from a large-scale assessment with a complex sampling design. It is also the only software that can be employed by researchers for secondary analyses of the NAAL literacy data. For additional information about AM, see White, Chen, & Atchison, 2008.

6. Analyses of the English prose literacy skills of foreign-born adults were performed by the authors of this study using 2003 NAAL data. For more information about these analyses please contact the authors.