Father–child activities and paternal attitudes in early child language development: the STEPS study

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between paternal attitudes, father–child activities, socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors, and the early child productive vocabulary. We also wanted to study if paternal factors affected boys’ and girls’ language acquisition differently. Our data consisted of 722 fathers and their children, who took part in the large Finnish cohort study titled Steps to the Healthy Development and Well-being of Children (the STEPS study). Child productive vocabulary was assessed at 24 months using the Finnish version of the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories Toddler-form (CDI-T). Regression analyses revealed that father–child activities and father’s social class were the most significant predictors of language development. Some paternal factors were more strongly connected with the positive language development of girls. Single strongest connection was found between the social class of fathers and the language skills of girls.

KEYWORDS:

• Father involvement
• father–child activities
• paternal attitudes
• child language development
• child gender
• CDI

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank families who took part in the STEPS study, the whole STEPS study research team and the Child and Youth Research Institute (CYRI).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Viivi Lankinen is a clinical speech and language therapist (MA) and is doing research at the University of Turku.

Marko Lähteenmäki is a PhD candidate who has graduated from the University of Turku in 2007 as a Master of Arts and is currently working as a project researcher at the University of Turku.

Anne Kaljonen is a statistican of Biostatistics, Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland.

Pirjo Korpilahti is PhD, professor emerita of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Turku, Finland, and an active researcher at the STEPS study.