Mothers’ Book Sharing Styles and Children’s School Readiness Skills

Maria Petrolekas

Parent-child book sharing is one context in which school readiness skills are fostered. A critical dimension of mother-child book-sharing is elaboration as it is predictive of emergent literacy. Narrative participation (i.e., the role mothers take during the interaction) is a second dimension posited to be related to children’s non-academic school readiness, especially for mothers in non-English speaking cultures. The current study examined both dimensions and their relation to children’s school readiness among 40 Greek and Greek-American mothers and their preschool-aged children. Dyads were asked to share a wordless book and interactions were coded for elaboration and participation. Children’s academic skills were assessed using letter recognition and vocabulary tasks; non-academic skills were measured using Leiter-R scale. Results show that for Greek dyads, participation is related to children’s school readiness skills and for Greek-Americans elaboration is only related to non-academic skills. Findings are discussed in relation to socialization goals for both cultural groups.