- By Isaac
- Van Wesep
Practice Makes Perfect: How Does Your Parenting Style Influence Your Child’s Executive Function Skills Development?
This article is part of our weekly series, Executive Function Tips for Families.
How Do Parenting Styles Affect Language Development and Executive Function Tasks Management?
This week, we’re breaking down a study about the associations between specific parenting practices and a child’s executive function development. Read on to learn how your parenting style can play a critical role in nurturing executive function skills and supporting school readiness.
Before We Continue: Understanding the Study
This article explores findings from the study The Role of Parenting Factors in Accelerating of Hindering the Development of HEF in Preschool Children by Seham Almutairi (2019), published in their Miami University, Doctoral dissertation.
The study investigates the connections between the quality of parent practice at home and hot executive function development in typically developing children. The first model the study proposes observed parent scaffolding types and their impacts on a child’s ability to solve problems in hot executive function situations while the second model examined parent scaffolding types and their impacts on a child’s ability to solve both hot and cool executive function tasks.
Key Terms to Keep in Mind as You Read:
Hot executive function task: A task that is driven by emotion
Cool executive function task: A task that is driven by logic and analysis
Elaborative parenting style: A parenting style characterized by freedom of choice, parent-child dialogue, and encouragement.
Directive parenting style: A parenting style characterized by rules and structure. This style is typically broken down into authoritarian or non-authoritarian behaviors.
How is This Related to Executive Function?
Executive function encompasses three primary cognitive processes: working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. These mental processes help us plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and manage multiple tasks successfully. Contrary to the common misconception that a child is either born with or without executive functioning skills, the parenting style a child experiences plays a large role in the nurturing and strengthening of their cognitive abilities.
Key Takeaways
1. Elaborative Parenting and Language Development
- The study shows a significant positive correlation between elaborative parenting support and higher levels of language development in children.
- There is no significant correlation between parental education level and language development in children.
2. Elaborative Parenting and Executive Function Tasks
- The study shows that the relationship between elaborative parenting support and cool executive function was found to be a function of parent education level.
- There is an observable interplay between parenting style and educational background.
3. Directive Parenting and Language Development
- Directive parenting showed no significant correlations to language development.
- A more directive parenting style does not contribute to an increase or decrease in language levels in preschool children.
4. Directive Parenting and Executive Function Tasks
- This study revealed that directive parenting significantly predicted child performance in hot executive function tasks.
- There was no relationship observed between directive parenting and cool executive function tasks.
5. Parenting Styles and Child Executive Function
- Directive parenting showed no significant correlations to language development.
- There was a negative correlation found between authoritative parenting and hot executive function task management, thus highlighting the potential detrimental effects of a controlling parenting style.
- Permissive parenting displayed no significant correlations with hot executive function task management while revealing a negative linear relationship with cool executive function task management.
Actionable Steps for Parents
Here’s how you can support your child’s EF development at home:
Understand Your Executive Function Skill Level
- Knowing your own EF strengths and weaknesses, as well as your parenting style, is crucial for planning skills-enhancing time with your child.
- Read Support Executive Function for tips on understanding your own EF level.
Balance Directive Practices
- Be mindful of offsetting directive parenting actions with plenty of praise and positive reinforcement.
- Play Walk the Line to practice scaffolding and modeling behaviors that exercise inhibitory control and focused attention.
Provide Opportunities for Independent Decision-making
- Giving your child space to choose their activities strengthens thinking skills. Supporting autonomous behavior shows preschoolers that you acknowledge their perspective. What a confidence boost!
- Read Let Me Choose to deepen your understanding of autonomy-supportive caregiving.
Why It Matters
By incorporating these strategies into your parenting style, you’re not just supporting their executive function development—you’re also helping them build their language skills and better manage hot and cool executive function tasks. Together, these foundations can pave the way for academic success!
