The Longitudinal Effects of Parenting Cognition on School Readiness Skills through Parenting Practices
AUTHOR : 김재희, 김현경
INFORMATION : page. 73~95 / 2021 Vol.28 No.2
ABSTRACT
This study examines the extent to which parenting cognition influences children’s school readiness during the transition to school through parenting practices, based on the parenting cognition model, using longitudinal data taken from the Panel Study on Korean Children. We tested the structural equation model in which parenting cognition at childbirth (i.e., parenting knowledge and parental expectation about the child’s future achievement) influenced children’s school readiness during the transition to school (i.e., academic skills and socio-emotional skills) directly or indirectly through parenting practices during preschool (i.e., parent-child interactions and extracurricular activities). Overall, our findings indicated that high levels of parenting knowledge at childbirth increased parent-child interactions at age 5 and subsequently improved children’s academic and socio-emotional school readiness skills at age 6. On the other hand, high levels of parental expectations about children’s future achievement at childbirth increased the level of providing extracurricular activities at age 4 and subsequently improved only children’s academic school readiness skills at age 6. Our findings suggest that improving parenting cognition, especially parenting knowledge during the transition to parenthood, could be a potentially effective parenting education intervention to facilitate children’s school readiness skills.