The Effects of Parental Reading Socialization and Early School Involvement on Children's Academic Performance: A Panel Study of Primary School Pupils in the Netherlands

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which parental reading socialization and early school involvement account for performance differences between low-status and high-status children in successive primary school grades. It investigates not only the direct effects of these parental practices on children's academic performance, but also the indirect effects, that is, controlling for the children's prior performance. It furthermore examines the influence of parental reading socialization and early school involvement on the longer term development of scholastic performance. Panel data are employed from four waves of the Dutch primary education cohort study, starting in 1996-1997. Using multilevel (repeated measurement) models, we find that parental reading socialization and parental school involvement both explain part of the association between social background and academic performance in successive primary school years. The positive, mainly indirect, impact of these factors, however, is stronger for children's language performance than for arithmetic achievement. Finally, children socialized in reading retain or even expand their advantage in language performance over children who lack early reading socialization. The positive impact of parental school involvement fades as primary school progresses.

Discussion and Conclusions

“…The results of the three-level models with a random intercept showed that, controlled for student's gender and SES, and taking into account between-schools and between-countries variance, there is a rather weak but positive relationship between early literacy activities and student achievement in reading literacy at grade 4. This positive association supports the Dutch study of Kloosterman et al (2011), who also found that early literacy activities were positively related to student reading achievement at primary school. We may here only confirm a positive association and cannot make any claims about causality, as PIRLS is cross-sectional.…”

Family Media Matters: Unraveling the Intergenerational Transmission of Reading and Television Tastes

“…Research has shown that parental media socialization practices are highly stratified (Notten and Kraaykamp 2009), meaning that children from families with different social backgrounds experience different levels and content of parental media socialization. Generally, and in line with Bourdieu's reproduction theory, children from higher social backgrounds experience a more beneficial and rewarding media climate in their parental homes (Crook 1997;De Graaf 1986;Elchardus and Siongers 2003;Kloosterman et al 2011). The focus in the current study is on the actual processes of parental media socialization-that is, on the (in)direct long-term effects of parents' media example and guidance on their children's media taste.…”

Transmission of cultural capital and status attainment – an analysis of development between 15 and 45 years of age

“…Moreover, with cross-sectional data collection, the duration of cultural capital influence over a person's life course remains uncertain, and the causal direction of status attainment processes underlying social reproduction cannot be adequately captured. Although some panel studies have been made in this area (Aschaffenburg & Maas, 1997;Kloostermann, Notten, Tolsma & Kraykaamp, 2011), and although data on parents' and children's cultural capital were not collected separately in these studies, the time periods analysed were relatively short (e.g., seven years, Kloostermann et al, 2011) and were limited to periods of school attendance. With the data available here, some of the desiderata can be realised:…”