African-American Father and Coparenting Quality Influences on School Readiness

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7. PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT. African-American children are at disproportionate risk for problems developing self-regulation and academic skills, critical factors for children's school readiness. School readiness is important because it predicts academic achievement and high school completion. Children who do not succeed academically are at substantially higher risk for poor physical and psychological health outcomes across the lifespan. Parenting that includes high-quality scaffolding of emerging skills during early childhood significantly predicts self-regulation. Even though involved residential and nonresidential fathers and father- figures (i.e., stepfathers, partners) play pivotal roles in self-regulation development, most research on parental scaffolding and African-American children's self-regulation and academic readiness has focused on mothers. This focus on mothers limits knowledge about residential and nonresidential African-American fathers or father- figures' contributions to self-regulation and academic readiness. Lack of information in this area hinders creation of effective, evidence-based interventions aimed at improving the lifespan outcomes of African-American children. This study proposes to fill this gap in the knowledge by synthesizing Feinberg's multidimensional coparenting concept with Sociocultural Theory to investigate associations between coparenting quality, scaffolding during parent-child interactions, and children's self-regulation and academic readiness. The aims are to: (1) Establish father residence and involvement, coparenting quality, mother-child and father-child interaction quality, children's self-regulation, and children's academic readiness associations; (2) Specify extent to which father residence and involvement moderate impact of coparenting quality on self-regulation and academic readiness; and (3) Specify extent to which (a) mother-child and father-child interaction quality mediate associations of coparenting quality and fathers' residence/involvement with children's self-regulation and academic readiness and (b) self-regulation mediates relationships between parent-child interaction quality and academic readiness. We will use a cross-sectional design to collect data from 70 African-American children and their families in the year prior to children's kindergarten entry. Sampling will target equal numbers of families with nonresidential and residential fathers or father-figures. We will address the aims using observations of mother- and father- child interactions, and direct assessment of child self-regulation and academic readiness. In addition to descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations, univariate tests will be calculated to identify gender and father- presence group differences. Hypotheses will be tested using multiple regression. Receptive vocabulary will be included as a covariate in models examining child outcomes. Sociodemographic risk, child gender, child age, and parent age will be included as covariates if preliminary analyses reveal significant correlations with independent, mediator, or moderator variables.