The Impact of Childcare and Parent–Child Interactions on School Readiness and Social Skills Development for Low-Income African American Children
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 47 kindergarten children participating in the federal free- and reduced-lunch program, an available proxy for socioeconomic risk, in an urban/suburban school district located in a medium-sized city in the southeastern United States. Participants were selected from five participating schools with high proportions of students enrolled in the free-lunch program (between 95% and 99% of students enrolled). A total of 68 parents and caregivers completed phone screening for the
DATA ANALYSIS
Missing data was replaced using the SPSS (2000) 10.1 implementation of the EM algorithm (expectation maximization). EM is a statistical technique for imputing missing data that employs an iterative estimation procedure to converge at a maximum-likelihood estimate that averages over the distribution of missing values Dempster et al., 1977, Little & Rubin, 1987, Schafer, 1997. EM assumes that data is missing as the result of a random process or that the mechanism resulting in missing data is
RESULTS
Means, Standard deviations, and correlations for predictor and criterion variables are presented in Table 1. Gender was not significantly correlated with childcare exposure, although it was correlated with parent–child interaction quality, social skills ratings, and receptive communication performance. In each instance the correlation favored girls. Maternal education level was positively correlated with a number of readiness outcomes including teacher ratings of readiness and performance on
DISCUSSION
This study was conducted to better understand the unique contributions of childcare involvement and parental behavior on academic readiness for low-income African American children, using multiple indicators of readiness-related outcomes including teacher-ratings of readiness and social skills development as well as independent assessment of cognitive and communications skills performance. As hypothesized, children enrolled in out-of-home childcare for more years prior to kindergarten
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on research conducted toward completion of the first author's dissertation in the Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina. The authors gratefully acknowledge comments on a draft of this manuscript from Emilie P. Smith, Laurie A. Ford, and Kevin J. Swick, and to colleagues of the Yale Division of Prevention and Community Research for helpful comments during revisions.
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