Child Inhibitory Control and Parent Factors as Contributors to School Readiness

Abstract

School readiness, the levels of basic academic and social skills that children have upon school entry, is strongly predictive of later academic and life outcomes. School readiness is often considered to have two separate but related components: socioemotional and academic. Both components are significantly associated with a child’s levels of inhibitory control (IC), the ability to inhibit responses to irrelevant stimuli when working on an identified goal. IC, in turn, is fostered or hindered by the parenting that child receives. In addition, parenting stress is associated with parenting behaviors and child socioemotional competence. Therefore, this dissertation sought to disentangle the associations between parenting behaviors, parenting stress, child IC, and socioemotional and academic school readiness in a sample of 87 mother-preschooler dyads. Results of this dissertation indicated that, in our sample, child IC and parenting behaviors were not associated with socioemotional school readiness. In addition, parenting stress was not found to be associated with child IC. However, child IC was found to be a significantly associated with academic school readiness.