Purpose: Poverty influences young children's well-being through its impact upon parents' mental health, childrearing beliefs and practices, and the home learning environment. The compromises in these domains, in turn, create risks to children's literacy and academic performance. Research suggests that the foundations of children's early literacy are a function of multiple home and family factors. These basic literacy experiences include the parents' creation of the language environment, use of literacy materials, and engagement in activities that expose children to language in various contexts. Yet, despite the strong negative association between poverty and the quality of the children's home learning environment, research has been unable to establish a causal link between the two. Relatively little is known about the familial factors that bolster low-income parents' tendency to engage in literacy related activities with their young children. This study longitudinally examines the role of direct and indirect family support factors related to low-income parents' engagement in literacy activities. Mothers' engagement in literacy activities with children at 36 months is designated as a primary direct literacy-based familial outcome while other direct and indirect familial factors are also examined. Methods: Using data from a local sample of families who qualified for the enrollment to the national, federally-funded, randomized Early Head Start study, researchers at the Catholic University of America investigated the path of the direct and indirect familial factors upon the frequency of mothers' engagement in literacy activities with their children. Trained staff collected data through structured bi-lingual interviews. All 149-applicant mothers provided information for baseline measures, and, 70 - 75%, for 24-month, 30-month, and 36-month child-birthday-related measures. Results: Frequency of mothers' engagement in literacy activities with children is related to certain activities that reflect a “parental pedagogy” for their children's foundational learning experiences. Specifically, mothers own reading habits, bedtime routines including literacy-related routines, outings through which children are exposed to the world outside of the home, and mothers' confidence in their own childrearing competencies, significantly (p<.05) predicted 45.6% of their literacy engagement when children turned 36 months. To further understand the influence these direct variables have as a representation of a parental pedagogy in creating parenting literacy-engagement-based environment, this study also examined the influence of indirect variables related to the direct variables. Several multiple regression analyses identified that these indirect variables, or baseline family needs and resources and mother's resilience, 24-month parenting role stress, 30-month family functioning and family income, and 36-month parental childrearing expectations, differentially but significantly (p<.05) supported and predicted the direct variables in family pedagogy. Implications for practice: The pattern between these familial factors suggests that having adequate resources, a stable stress-free family environment, a tendency toward a resilient outlook in life, and age-appropriate expectations for child development increases the likelihood of parental engagement in literacy-based practices with young children and thus provides children with a better foundation for future literacy-development. These findings substantiate the importance of the procurement of direct and indirect family supports and add validity to intervention policies that focus on both the family and the child.