Parental anxiety, endorsement of literacy learning, and home literacy practices among Chinese parents of young children

Abstract

To relieve young children of a burden and to encourage informal literacy practices such as shared book reading, the Chinese Ministry of Education implemented an early education policy that forbids the teaching of formal literacy (e.g., Chinese character recognition and Pinyin) as well as more ambitious literacy teaching practices (e.g., Teaching English as a Second Language—ESL) in kindergartens. Yet, little is known about the extent to which formal or ambitious literacy education is endorsed by low socioeconomic status (SES) and highly anxious parents who usually rely on classroom education as the great equalizer for their children. Neither do we know about the relationship between parental endorsement on these advanced learning goals and parents’ informal home literacy practices (e.g., shared book reading). This study intends to address this dearth in the literature by applying structural equation modeling to a sample of 4395 middle to low SES parents in China. Our findings show that, contrary to the policy makers’ expectation that downplaying Chinese word recognition and ESL would encourage informal literacy practices, highly anxious Chinese parents are motivated by their children’s Chinese word recognition to engage in shared book reading with their children. Without this motivator, highly anxious parents would read to their children even less. In comparison, calm parents were more likely to be motivated by their children’s ESL learning.