The Effects of Home-Based Parent Involvement, Parental Warmth, and Negativity on Kindergarten Outcomes Among Children of Immigrant Parents

Background and Purpose: Despite the current policy emphasis on strengthening family-school partnerships to raise students’ achievement levels, prior research indicates that home-based parent involvement has the most potential to improve children’s school achievement. While home-based parent involvement is a key characteristic of immigrant families, these immigrant families and their children, who represent a growing share of the early schooling population, face unique challenges related to involvement in their children’s education, such as lack of language proficiency and familiarity with the educational system, which often serve as barriers to their school-based involvement. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of home-based parent involvement as well as parental warmth and negativity on the social-emotional and academic outcomes of children of immigrant parents during the kindergarten year—a critical and sensitive period for later school success.

Methods: Data were drawn from the base year of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011) using both the fall and spring kindergarten data collections. Our initial study sample, then, included 9,187 children who had participated in both the fall and spring kindergarten data collections to first investigate whether there are differences in home-based parent involvement, warmth, and negativity between children of immigrant parents and children of U.S.-born parents. For subsequent analyses, we used a sub-sample of children of immigrant parents who were then stratified by income level so as to tease out associations between home-based parent involvement, warmth, and negativity, and kindergarten outcomes specifically among children of immigrant parents, and also to address potential confounding between immigration status and income level. Accordingly, these analyses consisted of a sub-sample of 1,921 children of immigrant parents that were included in OLS regressions of teacher reports regarding self-control, interpersonal skills, external problem behaviors, internal problem behaviors, as well as reading and math scores.

Results: Among the major findings, this study revealed that immigrant parents, on average, were less frequently involved in home-based activities and reported less warmth than U.S.-born parents across all three income levels. They also reported more negativity toward parenting than U.S.-born parents but only among near-poor households. Additionally, the study revealed that greater frequency of home-based parent involvement was associated with better interpersonal skills, fewer internal problem behaviors, and higher reading scores among children of immigrant parents. Moreover, negative attitudes toward parenting were associated with less self-control, worse interpersonal skills, and more external problem behaviors among children of immigrant parents. Notably, our last set of findings highlighted that the impact of parental negativity on children’s social-emotional outcomes is manifested primarily among poor children of immigrant parents.

Conclusions and Implications: Taken together, the findings suggest that government policies should be mindful of cultural differences in parent involvement and parenting styles. Policy interventions should be directed at relieving financial burden among low-income immigrant families and should promote positive parenting and interactions with children, which in turn, is likely to enhance immigrant children’s educational experiences.