The Relations Between Parents’ Beliefs, Parents’ Home Reading Practices, and Their Children’s Literacy Development in Kindergarten

Background Research indicates that parents’ involvement in early literacy, particularly through book reading, matters for young children’s language and literacy development. OBJECTIVE: However, little is known about the nature and extent of family book reading across the U.S. nation or about which factors support parents’ involvement in book reading. In particular, parents’ beliefs about promoting literacy may be linked to their book-reading actions, which can foster their children’s learning. Method We investigated several questions using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten 2011 (ECLS-K) dataset: (1) How are demographic characteristics (ethnicity, SES, and child age) predictive of parents’ literacy beliefs and home reading practices during children’s kindergarten year?; (2) How do parents’ literacy beliefs contribute to parents’ home reading practices during children’s kindergarten year?; and (3) How do parents’ literacy beliefs and home reading practices relate to children’s literacy development during their kindergarten year? We focused on data from Fall 2010 through Spring 2011, spanning the kindergarten year, and utilized descriptive and multivariate regression techniques. Results Regressions reveal that parents’ literacy beliefs are linked to their literacy practices, net of the effects of a variety of covariates. In turn, both beliefs and practices are uniquely linked to increases in children’s reading performance over the kindergarten year, demonstrating incremental validity for both sets of variables and reinforcing the importance of both beliefs and practices as part of the home learning environment. Conclusions The findings of this study underscore the critical role of parents’ beliefs in contributing to their home reading practices, which, in turn, are positively related to kindergarteners’ literacy development, net of the effects of variety of important covariates.