The role of gender ideology, intensive parenting, educational resources, and psychological well-being for parent-child reading frequency

ABSTRACT

This study examined frequently discussed parental characteristics and their importance in determining the frequency with which mothers and fathers read to 5 year-old children. It combined theories from various disciplines, focusing on the role of gender ideology, intensive parenting, educational resources and psychological well-being. It extends previous research by including composite effects, i.e. the combination of mothers’ and fathers’ characteristics.

Mothers’ and fathers’ reading frequency were analysed with ordered logistic regressions and average marginal effects, using wave 3 from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (N = 4,415 families). The results indicated that education and psychological well-being, as well as agreement with intensive parenting views, of both parents play a crucial role in determining their reading frequency: Parents with higher levels of education, those not suffering from depressive symptoms, and those holding intensive parenting values had a higher probability of reading more frequently. Additionally, the results suggested an interaction effect between parents’ levels of education, reinforcing the association between education and reading frequency. These are promising findings for the implementation of educational interventions: informing parents about the importance of frequently reading with their children and its benefits for their development might help reduce social inequalities in children’s early literacy, even in disadvantaged families.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• gender ideology
• intensive parenting
• parental resources
• parent–child reading
• UK

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Pia S. Schober, Marina Pumptow, Julia Büschges, and Karoline Mikus for their helpful feedback and various suggestions regarding previous drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 However, this is only true if the marginal effect remains constant over a one standard deviation interval. Especially for continuous variables, it has to be kept in mind that marginal effects do not remain constant, as they are based on a non-linear function. Depending on where along the curve one chooses to examine the marginal effect of a specific variable, it might be almost constant, or it might be changing quickly.

Additional information

Funding

Isabelle Fischer is a doctoral student at the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network. This research was funded by the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network [GSC1028], a project by the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments.