Shared Book Reading Interactions Within Families From Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds and Children’s Social Understanding and Prosocial Behavior

Abstract

The study explored the nature of mother–child conversation during and after a shared book reading (SBR) interaction and how it relates to children’s social understanding and prosocial behavior. Participants were 61 mother–child dyads (children’s mean age 5 years, 8 months) from low socioeconomic strata (SES). Mother–child SBR and their conversation following the reading were video-recorded. Children’s social understanding was evaluated via their ability to distinguish between social norms violations and moral violations. Prosocial behavior was evaluated through children’s sharing behavior. Results showed that during SBR, mothers and children from low SES tended to stick to the written text, whereas following the book reading, they elaborated beyond the explicit aspects of the text. Furthermore, references to socioemotional issues during mother–child conversation correlated with the child’s social understanding and prosocial behavior, beyond the child’s vocabulary level.

Home Environment, Bilingual Preschooler’s Receptive Mother Tongue Language Outcomes, and Social-Emotional and Behavioral Skills: One Stone for Two Birds?

“…Regarding the relations between home environment and children’s social-emotional skills, we have found reading frequency and library visits are negatively and significantly associated with children’s difficulty level, and Mandarin language reading frequency at home is positively related to children’s prosocial skills. Reading activities seem to function as a protection scheme for children’s early social-emotional wellbeing, in line with previous findings (Farver et al, 2006, 2013; Aram and Shapira, 2012; Aram et al, 2017). The benefits might be attributed to both the content of the books and the nature of the communication between child and adults during reading sessions (Aram and Shapira, 2012; Aram et al, 2017).…”

“…Reading activities seem to function as a protection scheme for children’s early social-emotional wellbeing, in line with previous findings (Farver et al, 2006, 2013; Aram and Shapira, 2012; Aram et al, 2017). The benefits might be attributed to both the content of the books and the nature of the communication between child and adults during reading sessions (Aram and Shapira, 2012; Aram et al, 2017). Children’s books often contain social and emotional experiences of the protagonist(s), thus providing children rich information to comprehend social, and emotional concepts (Zeece, 2004).…”

“…Parental literacy practice at home may not only affect children’s Mandarin proficiency, but also benefit children’s social-emotional and behavioral skills. As Aram et al (2017) advocated, policy makers and educational professionals should consider parental involvement in children’s general wellbeing as a crucial goal of early childhood education. Tutorials should be provided to the public, to instruct them on how to use home reading activities to engage children in a discussion and to explore social issues in related decontextualized talk.…”

“…Similar to home language exposure, home literacy activities have also been related to socio-emotional and behavioral skills (SEBS) in children (Farver et al, 2006; Aram and Aviram, 2009; Aram et al, 2017). For instance, Farver et al (2006) studied the relationship between literacy activities like library visits and joint book readings with children, and bilingual children’s vocabulary and social functioning scores in low SES families at the Latino Head Start preschool program.…”

Mothers' discourse during shared reading of books relating to ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions in different genres

“…They found that socio‐emotional utterances, such as references to characters' feelings, explained children's emotion understanding, empathy and prosocial behaviour. Additionally, Aram, Bergman Deitcher, Shoshan, and Ziv (2017) examined mother–child talk during SBR and found that statements of questions relating to emotions or social situations were related to children's social understanding and sharing behaviour. In a comparison of different types of discourse, including SBR, Martin (2017) found that parents' use of an increased number of emotion words predicted children's emotion knowledge and increased explanations of emotions predicted children's role‐taking.…”