Parent Discipline and Pre-schoolers' Social Skills

Educators recognize children's social competence as an indicator of school readiness. Children's social competence may be promoted prior to kindergarten through parents' discipline; however, prior research largely focused on parenting and social competence in older children or only focused on children's problem behaviours. We assessed parent discipline as a predictor of 37 low-income pre-schoolers' social skills over four months. Parents answered open-ended questions about how they would respond to child behaviours; children's pre-school teachers rated their social skills. In a hierarchical regression controlling for children's age and initial social skills, parents' inductions significantly predicted children's later social skills. Although children's social skills were correlated with parents' pairing of consequences and inductions, this relation was no longer significant when controlling for age and initial social skills. Power assertive discipline and time-outs were not significantly correlated with children's social skills. The results suggest that parents' inductions may be beneficial for children's social skills by focusing the child's attention on the reasons the behaviour was inappropriate.