Contribution of family risk, emergent literacy and environmental protective factors in children’s reading difficulties at the end of second-grade

Abstract

It is well established that emergent literacy is a strong predictor of later reading difficulties, and that the home literacy environment plays an important role in the development of children's preschool emergent literacy and oral language. Furthermore, reading difficulties runs in families and children with a family risk of reading difficulties tend to show delays in emergent literacy and might experience a less advantageous home literacy environment. This study examined whether family risk predicts children's second-grade reading difficulties in a multifactorial model including both emergent literacy and environmental protective factors such as home literacy environment and parental level of education. Children were assessed for emergent literacy at the beginning of first grade, and were identified as having reading difficulties at the end of second grade if they performed below the national threshold in at least three of the subtests in reading and spelling. The multifactorial model suggested that children with family risk showed reading difficulties that could not be explained in terms of individual differences in emergent literacy, gender, interest in literacy, years in kindergarten, home literacy environment or parental education level. These findings highlight the advantages of using multifactorial models of reading difficulties that encompass different domains of genetic, cognitive-based and environmental factors. In sum, not only did we find family risk is associated with children's literacy outcomes after 2 years of formal reading instruction, but we also identified possible modifiable factors that may benefit from interventions and lessen the likelihood of developing reading difficulties.

Longitudinal Effects of the Home Learning Environment and Parental Difficulties on Reading and Math Development Across Grades 1–9

“…Mothers’ reading difficulties, however, were not predictive of any of the children’s skills. These findings are consistent with those of previous studies showing significant FR effects for mathematics ( Shalev and Gross-Tsur, 2001 ; Soares et al, 2018 ) and reading ( Elbro et al, 1998 ; Torppa et al, 2011 , 2015 ; van Bergen et al, 2014a ; Hulme et al, 2015 ; Esmaeeli et al, 2019 ). However, the effect sizes were modest, with FR (coming from each parent) predicting approximately 1% of children’s skills in Grades 1 and 2.…”

“…At the etiological level, both reading and mathematical difficulties are known to be heritable ( Kovas et al, 2013 ; de Zeeuw et al, 2015 ; Little et al, 2017 ). Having a parent with reading difficulties, for example, increases the risk of children developing similar problems by up to 66% ( van Bergen et al, 2014a ; Hulme et al, 2015 ; Torppa et al, 2015 ; Esmaeeli et al, 2019 ). Significantly less is known about familial risk (FR) for mathematical difficulties (e.g., Soares et al, 2018 ).…”

“…To this end, we include FR for both reading and mathematics and examine the effects of both within-domain and cross-domain FR on reading and mathematical development. Although multiple studies have established that FR for reading difficulties is among the strongest predictors for dyslexia ( Scarborough, 1990 ; Pennington and Lefly, 2001 ; van Bergen et al, 2014a ; Torppa et al, 2015 ; Esmaeeli et al, 2019 ), so far, only few studies have suggested that the same is true for dyscalculia ( Shalev and Gross-Tsur, 2001 ; Soares et al, 2018 ). In addition, unlike most studies, we include the parental reading and mathematical difficulties of both mothers and fathers in our analysis to examine if the effects of having one parent with difficulties are different from the effects of having both parents with difficulties.…”

“…Few studies have gone further to investigate if HLE can act as a mediator between parental reading difficulties and children’s literacy outcomes. In their large-scale study with 6-year-old children, Esmaeeli et al (2019) suggested that HLE could play the role of a protective factor mediating the adverse influences of FR on children’s reading skills. However, Puglisi et al (2017) reported that informal HLE did not predict any children’s outcomes when maternal language and phonological skills were controlled for.…”

“…In this study, we estimate three different models: for reading fluency, for reading comprehension, and for arithmetic fluency based on our hypothesized models. In view of the research reviewed above, we constructed our hypothesized models (see Figure 1 for the model of reading fluency; other models were estimated with the same logic) with the expectation to find the following: (1) paths from parental reading difficulties ( Pennington and Lefly, 2001 ; Torppa et al, 2011 ; van Bergen et al, 2012 ; Hulme et al, 2015 ) and parental mathematical difficulties ( Shalev and Gross-Tsur, 2001 ; Soares et al, 2018 ) to the respective skills in children; (2) cross-domain paths from parental mathematical difficulties to children’s reading skills and from parental reading difficulties to children’s mathematical skills ( Landerl and Moll, 2010 ; Moll et al, 2015 ); (3) paths from HLE and HNE to both respective and cross-domain skills in children ( Melhuish et al, 2008 ; Anders et al, 2012 ; Kleemans et al, 2012 ; Baker, 2014 ; Napoli and Purpura, 2018 ); (4) paths from parental education to children’s skills ( Torppa et al, 2006 ; Hamilton et al, 2016 ; van Bergen et al, 2017 ); (5) paths from parental education to HLE and HNE ( Hamilton et al, 2016 ); and (6) paths from FR to the home environment ( Scarborough et al, 1991 ; Bus et al, 1995 ; Elbro et al, 1998 ; Snowling, 2000 ; Hamilton et al, 2016 ; Esmaeeli et al, 2019 ), including also the examination of the indirect relationships (FR → home environment → children’s skills), as Esmaeeli et al (2019) argued that these paths need to be tested in future studies. Finally, we expected that the paths to later skill assessments run through the early skill assessments.…”