Parent Involvement in Education as a Moderator of Family and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Context on School Readiness among Young Children

Limited socioeconomic family and neighborhood resources are known to influence multiple aspects of school readiness skills. Early parent involvement in education is hypothesized to attenuate risk for academic underachievement related to socioeconomic disadvantage. The current study used multilevel modeling to test whether parent involvement moderates the effects of family and neighborhood level socioeconomic resources on school readiness among a sample of 171 urban 4-year-olds. Parent involvement moderated the effect of family and neighborhood socioeconomic resources on the social-emotional-behavioral components of school readiness. Increased parent involvement in education was related to lower rates of behavior problems among children of single parents and among children from neighborhoods with higher levels of childcare burden. In contrast, parent involvement did not moderate the relation between socioeconomic risk and cognitive-academic components of school readiness skills. C © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.