DO THE AFFECTIVE QUALITIES OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONS DURING EARLY BOOK READING PREDICT PRESCHOOLERS' SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

Abstract

Shared parent-child book reading has been long regarded as critical for the promotion of early child development and school readiness skills, especially for language and literacy development. Shared book reading interactions may also promote socio-emotional development, which is important for successful transition into formal education. The current study explored whether emotional engagement during a shared book reading task between the child and caregiver relates to the child's self-regulation abilities. It is possible that socio-emotional and linguistic gains from shared book-reading may be influenced by the child's willingness to engage with the book, which may relate to self-regulation. This study examined whether engagement with a book reading task is correlated with performance on a self-regulation task. The participants consisted of 19 English-speaking parent-child dyads from a previous larger study. The parent-child dyads were filmed during a shared book reading task when the child was 36 months-old. The child's behavior during the book reading was coded every 30 seconds for facial expression and whether the child was in physical contact with the parent. At 54 months, the child completed the snack delay task, which involved giving the child an M&M on each trial and asking the child to wait varying amounts of time before eating it. The amount of time the child is willing to wait is a measure of self-regulation. There was a small positive correlation between the emotional engagement during book reading (as indicated by proportion of emotional faces made by the child) and performance on the self-regulation task. However, most of the children achieved perfect performance on the self-regulation task, so the results of the current experiment might not capture variations in self-regulation between the participants and should be interpreted with caution.