Early Parental Knowledge and Parent-Child Conversations Promote Preschool Language Skills: A Randomized Controlled...

Area of Science:

• Child Development
• Early Childhood Education
• Socioeconomic Disparities

Background:

• Socioeconomic status significantly impacts early childhood development, particularly language skills.
• Early interventions are crucial for mitigating developmental disparities in at-risk populations.
• Parental engagement and interaction quality are key mediators of child language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the long-term effects of the 3Ts-HV intervention on preschool language skills.
• To investigate the mediating roles of parental knowledge and parent-child conversational turns.
• To assess intervention efficacy in low-socioeconomic status (SES) families.

Main Methods:

• Randomized controlled trial with 92 parent-toddler dyads from low-SES backgrounds.
• Intervention group received 3Ts-HV; control group received Healthy Lifestyle curriculum (14-20 months).
• Assessed parental language, knowledge, conversational turns, and child language skills at multiple time points up to 50 months.

Main Results:

• The 3Ts-HV intervention significantly increased parental knowledge (26 months).
• Increased parental knowledge led to more parent-child conversational turns (38 months).
• Enhanced conversational turns positively impacted children's language skills (50 months), showing a serial mediation effect (β = 0.05).

Conclusions:

• The 3Ts-HV intervention effectively promotes children's language development through enhanced parental knowledge and interaction.
• Findings highlight the importance of early, targeted support for low-SES families to foster language equity.
• The study provides a longitudinal pathway demonstrating how to narrow developmental outcome disparities.